Blood and iron ae-1

by Harry Turtledove

  When something not too far from order had been restored, Dresser resumed: "I don't deny Jake has done some good things for the Party-don't get me wrong. But he's done us a good deal of harm, too, and it's not the kind of harm that's easily fixed. He's taken all the great things we stand for and boiled them down to hang the generals and hang the niggers. Not that they don't need hanging, mind you, but there are so many other things to get the country going again that need doing, too, and he never talks about a one of them. People get the wrong idea about us, you see."

  London and McWilliams followed with similar speeches. Out in the hard, uncomfortable seats that filled the hall, the Freedom Party members were silent, listening, judging.

  Confidence surged through Featherston. Even here, when they should be doing everything to crush him, his opponents beat around the bush and tried to see all sides of the question. He would never make that mistake. "Mr. Chairman!" he said. "Can I speak for myself, or are you just going to railroad me altogether?"

  Warily, Dresser said, "Go ahead, Jake. Have your say. Then we vote."

  "Right," Featherston said tightly. He looked out at the crowd. "Now is the time to fish or cut bait," he said. "The reason I'm head of propaganda is that I'm the only man up here people can listen to without falling asleep." That got him a laugh. Anthony Dresser, sputtering angrily, tried to gavel it down and failed. "I'm the one who brings in the money-Ernie said so himself. And I'll tell you why-I keep it simple. That's what propaganda is all about. I make people want to support us. I don't say one thing Monday and another thing Tuesday and something else on Wednesday. Like I say, I keep it simple."

  He took a deep breath. "I shake things up. I make the people in high places sweat. That's the other thing propaganda is for, folks-to show people your way is better. So. Here it is: you can go on with me and see how much we can shake loose together, or you can throw me out and spend your time pounding each other on the back, on account of it'll be a cold day in hell before you see any more new members." He rounded on Anthony Dresser. In tones of contemptuous certainty, he said, "Mr. Chairman, I call the question."

  Dresser stared, the scales suddenly fallen from his eyes. "You don't want to be head of propaganda," he stammered. "You- You want to head the Party."

  Jake grinned, hiding his own unease where Dresser let his show. "I call the question," he repeated.

  Licking his lips, Dresser said, "In favor of removing Jake Featherston?" Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the men in the hall raised their hands. In a voice like ashes, Dresser said, "Opposed?" The rest of the hands flew high. So did a great shout of triumph. "The motion is not carried," Dresser choked out.

  "Mr. Chairman!" Ferdinand Koenig said, and Dresser was rash enough to recognize the Party secretary. Koenig went on, "Mr. Chairman, I move that you step down and we make Jake Featherston chairman of the Freedom Party."

  Another great shout rose. In it were two dozen cries of, "Second!" — maybe more. Featherston and Koenig grinned at each other as Anthony Dresser presided over voting himself out of office. In that glorious moment, Jake felt the world turned only because his hands worked its axis. He had his chance now. He didn't know what he would make of it, not yet, but it was there.

  Stephen Douglas Martin looked at his son. "I wish you wouldn't do this," he said, worry in his voice.

  "I know," Chester Martin answered. "You've got to understand, though-you have a place. The way the bosses are acting these days, I'll never have one, not unless I take it for myself."

  His father pointed to the bulge of the pistol behind his belt. "You won't get it with that."

  "I won't get it any other way," Martin said stubbornly. "I don't aim to shoot first-I'm not that stupid-but I'm not stupid enough to stand around and watch my friends on the picket lines get shot down like dogs, either. If there's no trouble, fine. But if those goons start banging away at me, I'm not going to run like a rabbit, not any more."

  His father shook his head, a troubled gesture. "You've been listening to the Socialists again. If I never see another red flag, it'll be too soon."

  "You don't get it, Pa," Chester said, impatient with the ignorance of the older generation. "If it weren't for the Socialists, nobody'd make any kind of decent money-the bosses would have it all." Unending labor strife since he'd come home from the war had eroded his lifelong faith in the Democratic Party.

  "You're going to end up on a blacklist," his father said gloomily. "Then you won't have any work at all, no matter how the strikes turn out."

  "I won't have any steel work, maybe," Chester said with a shrug. "One way or another, though, I'll get along. There's plenty of things I can do if I have to. One of 'em or another is bound to work out. I'm a white man; I pull my weight."

  "Aahhh." Stephen Douglas Martin made a disgusted noise. "You're in it for the glory. I remember the red flags flying back in the '90s, too, and the battles, and the blood in the streets. It was all foolishness, if you ask me."

  "Glory?" Chester Martin laughed bitterly. He unbuttoned his left cuff and rolled the sleeve high to show the scar a Confederate bullet had left on his upper arm. "There's no such thing as glory, near as I can tell. If the machine guns didn't kill it, the artillery did. Teddy Roosevelt promised us a square deal, but I don't see him delivering. If I have to go out into the streets to get it, I'll do that-and to hell with glory."

  "Aahhh," his father repeated. "Well, go on, then, since that's what you're bound and determined to do. I only hope you come back in one piece, that's all. You're playing for keeps out there."

  Chester nodded. The thought did not bother him, or not unduly. He'd been playing for keeps since his first comrade got hung up on Confederate barbed wire and shot just inside the Virginia line back in August 1914. He said, "What was the war about, if it wasn't about having a better life after it was over? I don't see that, not for me I don't, not without this fight. I'm still here in the old room I had before I went into the Army, for heaven's sake."

  "I buried one son, Chester, when the scarlet fever took your brother Hank," his father said heavily. "It tore my heart in two, and what it did to your mother… If I had to do it twice, I don't know how I'd get by afterwards."

  Chester Martin slapped his father on the back. "It'll be all right. I know what I'm doing, and I know why I'm doing it." That wasn't the bravado he might have shown in the days before conscription pulled him into the Army. Instead, it was a man's sober assessment of risk and need.

  His father said nothing more. His father plainly saw there was nothing more to say. With a last nod, Chester left the flat, went down to the corner, and waited for the trolley that would take him into the heart of Toledo and into the heart of the struggle against the steelmill owners.

  The strikers, by now, had their own headquarters, a rented hall a couple of blocks away from the long row of steelworks whose stacks belched clouds of black, sulfurous smoke into the sky. The hall had its own forward guards and then a stronger force of defenders in red armbands closer to it. Most of the strike's leaders had served in the Great War. They understood the need to defend a position in depth.

  An unusual number of trash cans and kegs and benches lined the street by the hall. If the Toledo police tried to raid the place, the strikers could throw up barricades in a hurry. They'd already done that more than once, when their struggle with the owners heated up. For now, though, motorcars whizzed past the hall.

  For now, too, blue-uniformed police made their way past the strikers' guards. The men in blue strolled along as if they were in full control of the neighborhood. Only a few of them strolled along at any one time, though. A tacit understanding between the leaders of the strike and city hall let the police keep that illusion of control, provided they did not try to turn it into reality. The agreement was not only tacit but also fragile; when things heated up on the picket lines, the cops drew near at their peril.

  "What do you say, Chester?" Albert Bauer called when Martin walked into the hall. The stocky steelworker ma
de a fist. "Here's to the revolution-the one you said we didn't need."

  "Ahh, shut up, Al," Martin answered with a sour grin. "Or if you don't want to shut up, tell me you were never wrong in your whole life."

  "Can't do it," Bauer admitted. "But I'll tell you this: I don't think I was ever wrong on anything this important."

  "Teach me to be like you, then," Martin said, jeering a little.

  "You're learning." Bauer was imperturbable. "You started out mystified by the capitalists, same as so many do, but you're learning. Before too long, you'll see them like they really are- nothing but exploiters who need to be swept onto the ash heap of history so the proletariat can advance."

  "I don't know anything about the ash heap of history," Martin said. "I hope some of them get swept away in the elections. They're only a couple of months off. That would send the country the right kind of message "

  "So it would," Bauer said. "So it would. That means we have to send the country the right kind of message between now and election day."

  "You mean you don't want me to go out and start taking potshots at the ugly blue bastards who've been taking potshots at us?" Martin said.

  "Something like that, yeah." Bauer's eyes went to the pistol concealed-but not well enough-in the waistband of Martin's trousers. "We aren't out to start any trouble now. If the police start it, we'll give them as much as they want, but the papers have to be able to say they went after us first."

  "All right." That made sense to Martin. He headed over to the neat rows of picket signs. Choosing one that read A SQUARE DEAL MEANS A SQUARE MEAL, he shouldered it as if it were a Springfield and headed out toward the line the striking steelworkers had thrown up around the nearest plant.

  By then, the scabs who kept the plant running had already gone in. Martin was sure they'd gone in under a hail of curses. Perhaps they hadn't gone in under a hail of rocks and bottles today. That was the sort of thing that touched off battles with the police, and everything seemed quiet for the time being, as it had on the Roanoke front when both sides were gearing up to have a go at each other.

  Martin marched along the sidewalk. Toledo police and company guards kept a close eye on the strikers. The police looked hot and bored. Martin was hot and bored, too. Sweat ran off him in rivers; the day was muggy, without a hint of a breeze. He kept a wary eye on the company guards. They looked hot, too, but they also looked like Great Danes quivering on the end of leashes, ever so eager to bite anything that came near.

  "Scab-lovers!" the strikers taunted them. "Whores!" "Goons!" "Stinking sons of bitches!"

  "Your mothers were whores!" the guards shouted back. "Your fathers were niggers, just like the ones who rose up in the CSA!'

  "Shut up!" the cops shouted, over and over. "Shut the hell up, all of you!'1 They didn't want to have to do anything but stand there. Brawling on a day like this was more trouble than it was worth. Chester Martin knew a little sympathy for them, but only a little. He cursed the company guards along with everybody else on the picket line.

  Socialist Party workers brought the picketers cheese sandwiches to eat while they marched. In the middle of the afternoon, a picketer and a cop keeled over from the heat within a few minutes of each other. No company guards keeled over. They had all the food and cold water they wanted.

  Shift-changing time neared. Chester Martin tensed. The picketers' shouts, which had grown perfunctory, turned loud and fierce and angry once more as the scabs, escorted by guards and police both, left the steelworks.

  "Back away!" a policeman yelled at the strikers. Martin had heard that shout so often, he was sick to death of it. The cop shouted again anyhow: "Back away, you men, or you'll be sorry!'"

  Sometimes the striking steelworkers would back away. Sometimes they would surge forward and attack the scabs regardless of the cops and goons protecting them. Martin had been in several pitched battles-that was what the newspapers called them, anyway. To a man who'd known real combat, they didn't rate the name. Either the reporters had managed to sit out the war on the sidelines or they cared more about selling papers than telling the truth. Maybe both those things were true at once. It wouldn't have surprised Martin a bit.

  Today, nothing untoward happened. The strikers jeered and cursed the scabs and called, "Join us!" More than a few former scabs had quit their jobs and started on the picket lines. No one threw a stone or a horse turd this afternoon, though. No one started shooting, either, although Martin was sure he was a long way from the only striker carrying a pistol.

  Having been through more gunfire than he'd ever wanted to imagine, he was anything but sorry not to land in it again. He trudged back to the strikers' hall, turned in his sign, and dug a nickel out of his pocket for trolley fare. His father and mother would be glad to see him home in one piece. He wondered about his sister. From some of the stories Sue told, her boss exploited her, too.

  As he stood on the streetcorner, he shook his head in slow wonder. "The bosses are too stupid to know it," he murmured, "but they're turning a whole bunch of good Democrats into revolutionaries."

  Scipio had hoped he would never hear of the Freedom Party again after that one rally in May Park. He hadn't thought such a hope too unreasonable: he'd never heard of it till that rally. With any luck, the so-called party would turn out to be one angry white man going from town to town on the train. The times were ripe for such cranks.

  But, as summer slowly gave way to fall, the Freedom Party opened an office in Augusta. The office was nowhere near the Terry; even had more than a handful of Negroes been eligible to vote, the Freedom Party would not have gone looking for their support. Scipio found out about the office in a one-paragraph story on an inside page of the Augusta Constitutionalist,

  He showed the story to his boss, a grizzled Negro named Erasmus who ran a fish market that doubled as a fried-fish cafe. Erasmus, he'd seen, was a shrewd businessman, but read only slowly and haltingly, mumbling the words under his breath. When at last he finished, he looked over the tops of his half-glasses at Scipio. "Ain't such a bad thing, Xerxes, I don't reckon," he said.

  "The buckra in this here party hates we," Scipio protested. After close to a year in Augusta, he'd grown as used to his alias as he was to his right name. "They gets anywheres, ain't gwine do we no good."

  Erasmus peered at him over those silly little spectacles again. ''Most o' the white folks hates us," he answered matter-of-factly. 'These ones here, at least they's honest about it. Reckon I'd sooner know who can't stand me than have folks tell me lies."

  That made a certain amount of sense-but only, Scipio thought, a certain amount. 'The buckra wants to be on top, sure enough," he said. "But these here Freedom Party buckra, they wants to be on top on account o' they wants we in de grave, six feets under de ground."

  His boss shook his head. "White folks ain't that stupid. We dead an' buried, who gwine do their for work them? You answer me dat, an then I'll worry 'bout this here Freedom Party."

  "Huh," Scipio said. He thought for a little while, then laughed a bit sheepishly. "Mebbe you's right. Cain't you jus' see de po' buckra out in de cotton fields, wid de overseer yellin' an' cursin' at they to move they lazy white backsides?"

  "Lawd have mercy, I wish to Jesus I could see me that," Erasmus said. "I pay money to see that. But it ain't gwine happen. White folks ain't about to get their soft hands all blistered an' dirty, an' we's safe enough because o' that." A Negro in overalls came in and sat down at one of the half dozen rickety little tables in front of the counter where fish lay on ice. Erasmus pointed. "Never mind this stupid stuff we can't do nothin' about anyways. Get yourself over there an' see what Pythagoras wants to eat."

  "Fried catfish an' cornbread," the customer said as Scipio came up to him. "Lemonade on the side."

  "I gets it for you," Scipio answered. He turned to see whether Erasmus had heard the order or he'd have to relay it. His boss had already plucked a catfish from the ice; an empty spot showed where it had been. A moment later, hot lard sizzled as
the fish, after a quick dip into egg batter, went into the frying pan.

  Scipio poured lemonade and cut a chunk from the pan of moist, yellow cornbread Erasmus had baked that morning. He took the lemonade over to Pythagoras. By the time he got back, Erasmus had slapped the fried catfish onto the plate with the cornbread. He also dipped up a ladleful of greens from a cast-iron pot on the back of the stove and plopped them down alongside the fish.

  "He don't ask for no greens," Scipio said quietly.

  "Once he sees 'em, he decide he wants 'em," Erasmus said. "He been comin' in here better'n ten years. You reckon I don't know what he wants?"

  Without another word, Scipio took the plate over to Pythagoras. He had spent years learning to anticipate Anne Colleton's needs and to minister to them even before she knew she had them. If Erasmus had done the same with his regular customers, how could Scipio argue with him?

  And, sure enough, Pythagoras waved to Erasmus and ate the greens with every sign of enjoyment. He ordered a slab of peach pie for dessert. Only after he'd polished that off did he turn a wary eye on Scipio and ask, "What's all that come to?"

  "Thirty-fi' dollars," Scipio answered, and waited for the sky to fall.

  Pythagoras only shrugged, sighed, and pulled a fat wad of banknotes from a hip pocket. He peeled off two twenties and set them on the table. "Don' fret yourself none about no change," he said as he stood up. "Foe the war, I don't reckon I never had thirty-five dollars, not all at the same time. Money come easy now, but Lord! it sure do go easy, too." He lifted his cloth cap in salute to Erasmus, then went back out onto the street.

  "Do Jesus!" Scipio said. "He sure enough right about dat." Erasmus was paying him $500 a week after his latest raise, and feeding him dinner every day besides. Despite what would have looked like spectacular wealth in 1914, Scipio remained just one more poor Negro in the Terry.

  Erasmus said, "It ain't all bad. Couple weeks ago, I done took me a thousand dollars down to the bank so I could pay off the note on my house. Should have seen them white bankers fuss an' flop-jus' like a catfish on a hook, they was." His reminiscent grin showed a couple of missing front teeth. "Wasn't nothin' they could do about it, though. Money's money, ain't that right?" He laughed.