The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  In front of city hall, a Whig speaker with a megaphone was exhorting a crowd that didn't look to be paying too much attention to him. Eight or ten policemen stood around looking bored. "Outstanding!" Briggs exclaimed. "Nobody gave us away. They'd be a lot readier if they reckoned we were gonna hit 'em." His voice rose to a great roar: "Freedom!"

  "Freedom!" Jefferson Pinkard bawled, along with his comrades. They charged forward, tough and disciplined as they'd been during the war. Whistles shrilling, the Birmingham policemen tried to get between them and the suddenly shouting and screaming Whigs. If the cops had opened fire, they might have done it. As things were, their billy clubs were no improvement on the Freedom Party bludgeons. Jeff got one of the men in gray in the side of the head.

  Then he was in among the Whigs, yelling, "Freedom!" and "Damnyankee puppets!" at the top of his lungs. His bludgeon rose and fell, rose and fell. Sometimes he hit men, sometimes women. He wasn't fussy. Why fuss? They were all traitors, anyway. A few of them tried to fight back, but they didn't have much luck. The Whig rally smashed, their enemies bloodied, the Freedom Party men withdrew in good order. Jeff had a hard-on all the way back to the diner. Those bastards, he thought. They got just what they deserved.

  S ylvia Enos wasn't used to being a celebrity. She wished people wouldn't stop her on the streets of Boston and tell her she was a hero. She didn't want to be a hero. She'd never wanted to be one. All I wanted was to have George back again, she thought as she hurried back toward her block of flats.

  But she'd never see her husband again. George Enos had been aboard the USS Ericsson when the CSS Bonefish torpedoed her-after the Confederate States yielded to the USA. Roger Kimball, the captain of the Bonefish, had known the war was over, too. He'd known, but he hadn't cared. He'd sunk the destroyer that carried George and more than a hundred other sailors, and then he'd sailed away.

  He'd tried to cover it up, too. No one could prove a British boat hadn't done the deed-till the Bonefish 's executive officer, in a political fight with Roger Kimball, broke the story in the papers to discredit him. The story said Kimball was living in Charleston, South Carolina.

  And so Sylvia had taken a train down to Charleston. Customs at the border hadn't searched her luggage. Why should the Confederates have bothered? She looked like what she was: a widow in her thirties. That she also happened to be a widow in her thirties with a pistol in her suitcase had never crossed the Confederates' minds.

  But she was. And when she got to Charleston and found out where Kimball lived, she'd knocked on his door and then fired several shots into him. She'd expected to spend the rest of her life in jail, or to hang, or to cook in an electric chair-she hadn't known how South Carolina disposed of murderers.

  Instead, thanks to politics and thanks to an extraordinary woman named Anne Colleton, she found herself free and back in Boston. The CSA couldn't afford to be too hard on someone who killed a war criminal, she thought. And why? Because the United States are stronger than they are. That was heady as whiskey. Till the Great War, the CSA and England and France had called the tune. No more.

  But, no matter how strong the United States were, they weren't strong enough to give her back her husband. The hole in her life, the hole in her family, would never heal. She had no choice but to go on from there.

  A tall, skinny man in an expensive suit and homburg stopped in front of her, so that she either had to stop, too, or to run into him. "You're Sylvia Enos," he exclaimed. "I've been looking for you. Give me a moment of your time."

  He didn't even say please. Sylvia's patience had worn thin. "Why should I?" she asked, and got ready to push past him. She reached up to fiddle with her hat. She had a hat pin with an artificial pearl at one end and a very sharp point at the other. Some men were interested in her for the sake of politics, others for other, murkier, reasons.

  But this fellow proved one of the former sort. "Why? For the sake of your country, that's why." He had the map of Ireland on his face; the slightest hint of a brogue lay under his flat New England vowels.

  "Look, whoever you are, I haven't got time for anything except my children, so if you'll excuse me-" She started forward. If he didn't get out of the way, maybe she'd use the hat pin whether he had designs on her person or not.

  "My name is Kennedy, Mrs. Enos, Joe Kennedy," he said. "I'm the head of the Democratic Party in your ward."

  No hat pin, then, except in an emergency. If she got on the wrong side of a politician, he could make life hard for her, and life was hard enough already. With a sigh, she said, "Speak your piece, then, Mr. Kennedy-though I don't know why you're bothering with me. After all, women can't vote in Massachusetts."

  His answering smile was forced. The Democrats had always been less eager for women's suffrage than either the Socialists or what was left of the Republican Party. But he quickly rallied: "Do you want us weak, too weak to take our proper place in the world? If you do, the Socialist Party's the perfect place for you. They're trying to throw away everything we won in the war."

  That did hit home. "What do you want from me, Mr. Kennedy? Tell me quickly, and I'll give you my answer, but I have to get home to my son and daughter."

  Something glinted in his eyes. It made Sylvia half reach for the pin again. Kennedy wore a wedding ring, but Sylvia had long since seen how little that meant. Men got it where they could. George, she made herself remember, had been the same way. But all the ward leader said was, "An hour of your time at our next meeting would be very fine, to show you stand with us on the issues of the day."

  He acted as if it were a small request, something where she wouldn't need to think twice before she said yes. But she shook her head. "You must be rich, to have hours you can throw around. When I'm not working, I'm cooking or minding the children. I'm sorry, but I've got no time to spare."

  Kennedy's mouth tightened. He drummed the fingers of his right hand against his trouser leg. Sylvia got the feeling he wasn't used to hearing people tell him no. The vapor that steamed from his nostrils as he exhaled added to the impression. It also made him look a little like a demon.

  But then, as suddenly as if he'd flipped the switch to an electric light, he gave Sylvia a bright smile. "If you like, my own wife will watch your children while you come. Rose would be glad to do it. She knows how important to the country winning the next election is."

  That couldn't mean anything but, My wife will watch your children if I tell her to. Whatever it meant, it did put Sylvia in an awkward position. She said, "You know how to get what you want, don't you?"

  "I try," Joe Kennedy said. This time, the smile he gave her had nothing to do with the automatic politician's version he'd used a moment before. This one was genuine: a little hard, a little predatory, and a little smug, too.

  How could anyone marry a man with a smile like that? But that, thank heaven, wasn't Sylvia's worry. Kennedy stood there with that hot, fierce smile, waiting for her answer. Now he'd gone out of his way to give her what she'd said she wanted. How could she tell him no? She saw no way, though she still would have liked to.

  With a sigh of her own, she told him, "I'll come to your meeting, if it's not at a time when I'm working."

  "I hope it isn't," he said. The smile got broader-she'd given in. She might almost have let him take her to bed. He went on, "We hold them Saturday afternoons, so most people can use the half-holiday."

  Sylvia sighed again. "All right, though heaven only knows how I'll get my shopping done-or why you think your people want to listen to me."

  "Don't worry about your shopping," Kennedy said, which had to prove he didn't do much for himself. "And people want to hear you because you took action. You saw a wrong and you fixed it. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud of you. Even the Socialists had to take notice of the justice in what you did. And I'll be by to pick you up Saturday afternoon at one o'clock, if that's all right."

  "I suppose so," Sylvia said, still more than a little dazed. Joe Kennedy tipped his homburg and went on his way. Sylvia check
ed the mailbox in the lobby of her block of flats, found nothing but advertising circulars, and walked up three flights of stairs to her apartment.

  "What took you so long, Mother?" George, Jr., asked. He was thirteen now, which seemed incredible to her, and looked more like his dead father every day. Mary Jane, who was ten, was frying potatoes on the coal stove.

  "I ran into a man," Sylvia answered. "He wants me to talk at the Democratic club's ward meeting. His wife will keep an eye on you two while I'm gone." She went to the icebox and got out the halibut steaks she'd fry along with the potatoes. Mary Jane still wasn't up to main courses.

  "Saturday afternoon? I won't be here anyway," George, Jr., said.

  "What? Why not?" Sylvia asked.

  "Because I got a job carrying fish and ice down on T Wharf, that's why." Her son looked ready to burst with pride. "Thirty-five cents an hour, and it lets me get started, Ma."

  Slowly, Sylvia nodded. "Your father started on T Wharf right about your age, too," she said. People who caught fish in Boston almost always started young. But George, Jr., suddenly didn't seem so young as all that. He was old enough to have convinced someone to hire him, anyhow.

  He said, "I'll bring all my money home to you, Ma, every penny. Cross my heart and hope to die if I don't. I won't spend a bit on candy or pop or anything, honest I won't. I know we need it. So did the fellow who hired me. He asked if I was Pa's boy, and when I said yes he gave me the job right there. His name's Fred Butcher."

  "Oh, yes. I know him-you've met him, too, you know." Sylvia nodded again. "He used to go out with your father on the Ripple. He was first mate in those days, and he's done well for himself since."

  "As soon as I can, Ma, I'll go out and make money," Mary Jane promised, adding, "I don't much like school anyway."

  "You need to keep going a while longer," Sylvia said sternly. She rounded on her son. "And so do you. If you study hard, maybe you can get a good job, and you won't stay down on T Wharf your whole life."

  She might as well have spoken Chinese. Staring at her in perfect incomprehension, George, Jr., said, "But I like it down on T Wharf, Ma."

  Sylvia flipped the halibut steaks with a spatula. She thought about explaining why all the backbreaking jobs associated with the fishing weren't necessarily good choices, but she could tell he wouldn't listen. His father wouldn't have, either. She didn't start a fight she had no hope of winning. Instead, she just said, "Supper will be ready in a couple of minutes. Go wash your hands, both of you."

  Joe Kennedy and his wife knocked on the door that Saturday afternoon a few minutes after Sylvia got home. Rose Kennedy was pretty in a bony way, and more refined than Sylvia had expected. She did warm up, a little, to Mary Jane. "You're sweet, dear. Will we be friends?"

  Mary Jane considered, then shrugged. Joe Kennedy said, "Come on, Mrs. Enos. My motorcar's out in front of the building. People are looking forward to hearing you; they really are."

  That still astonished Sylvia. So did Kennedy's motorcar. She'd expected a plain black Ford, the kind most people drove. But he had an enormous Oldsmobile roadster, painted fire-engine red. He drove as if he owned the only car on the street, too, which in Boston was an invitation to suicide. Somehow, he reached the Democratic Party hall unscathed. Sylvia discovered a belief in miracles.

  "Here she is, ladies and gentlemen!" Kennedy introduced her as if she were a vaudeville star. "The brave lady you've been waiting for, Sylvia Enos!"

  Looking out at that sea of faces frightened Sylvia. The wave of applause frightened and warmed her at the same time. She stammered a little at first, but gained fluency as she explained what she'd done in South Carolina, and why. She'd told the story before; it got easier each time. She finished, "If we forget about the war, try to pretend it never happened, what did we really win? Nothing!" The applause that came then rang louder still.

  II

  Jake Featherston drummed his fingers on his desk. Spring was in the air in Richmond; the trees were putting on new leaves, while birdsong gladdened every ear. Or almost every ear-it did very little for Featherston. He'd led a battery of three-inch guns during the war, and much preferred their bellowing to the sweet notes of catbird and sparrow. When the guns roared, at least a man knew he was in a fight.

  "And we are, God damn it," Featherston muttered. The leader of the Freedom Party was a lanky man in his mid-thirties, with cheekbones and chin thrusting up under the flesh of his face like rocks under a thin coat of soil on some farm that would always yield more trouble than crops. His eyes… Some people were drawn to them, while others flinched away. He knew that. He didn't quite understand it, but he knew it and used it. I always mean what I say, he told himself. And that shows. With all the lying sons of bitches running around loose, you'd better believe it shows.

  If he looked out his window, he could see Capitol Square, and the Confederate Capitol in it. His lip curled in fine contempt. If that wasn't the home of some of the biggest, lyingest sons of bitches in the whole wide world… "If it isn't, then I'm a nigger," Featherston declared. He talked to himself a fair amount, hardly noticing he was doing it. More than three years of serving a gun had taken a good deal of his hearing. People who didn't care for him claimed he was selectively deaf. They had a point, too, though he wasn't about to admit it.

  The Capitol shared the square with a large equestrian statue of George Washington-who, being a Virginian, was much more revered in the CSA than in the USA these days-and an even larger one of Albert Sidney Johnston, hero and martyr during the War of Secession. Somewhere between one of those statues and the other, Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA almost ten years before.

  "We should've licked those Yankee bastards," Featherston said, as if somebody'd claimed otherwise. "If the niggers hadn't risen up and stabbed us in the back, we would've licked those Yankee bastards." He believed it with every fiber of his being.

  And if that jackass down in Birmingham hadn't blown out President Hampton's stinking brains, what there were of them, the Party'd be well on its way towards putting this country back on its feet again. Jake slammed a scarred, callused fist down on the desk. Papers jumped. I was so close, dammit. He'd come within a whisker-well, two whiskers-of winning the presidential election in 1921. Looking toward 1927, he'd seen nothing but smooth sailing ahead.

  Of course, one of the reasons the Freedom Party had almost won in 1921 was that its members went out there and brawled with anybody rash enough to have a different opinion. If you looked at things from one angle, President Hampton's assassination followed from the Freedom Party's nature almost as inexorably as night followed day.

  Jake Featherston was not, had never been, and never would be a man to look at things that way.

  He'd watched the Party lose seats in the 1923 Congressional elections. He'd been glad the losses weren't worse. Other people celebrated because they were as large as they were. Up till that damned unfortunate incident, the Freedom Party had gone from success to success, each building momentum for the next. Unfortunately, he was finding the process worked the same way for failure.

  What do we do if the money doesn't keep coming in? What can we do if the money doesn't keep coming in? he wondered. Only one answer occurred to him. We go under, that's what. When he'd first joined the Freedom Party in the dark days right after the war, it had been nothing to speak of: a handful of angry men meeting in a saloon, with the membership list and everything else in a cigar box. It could end up that way again, too; he knew as much. Plenty of groups of disgruntled veterans had never got any bigger, and the Party had swallowed up a lot of the ones that had. Some other group could swallow it the same way.

  "No, goddammit," Jake snarled. For one thing, he remained convinced he was right. If the rest of the world didn't think so, the rest of the world was wrong. And, for another, he'd got used to leading an important political party. He liked it. Without false modesty-and he was singularly free of modesty, false and otherwise-he knew he was good at it. He didn't want to play second
fiddle to anybody else, and he didn't want to go back to being a big fish in a tiny pond.

  The telephone on his desk jangled. He picked it up. "Featherston," he barked into the mouthpiece.

  "Yes, Mr. Featherston," his secretary said. "I just wanted to remind you that you've got that talk on the wireless coming up in a little more than an hour. You'll want to make sure you're at the studio on time."

  "Thank you kindly, Lulu," Featherston answered. He was more polite to Lulu Mattox than to practically anybody else he could think of. Unlike most people, his secretary deserved it. She was a maiden lady, somewhere between forty and seventy. Once upon a time, he'd read or heard-he couldn't remember where or when-that Roman Catholic nuns were the brides of Christ. What he really knew about Catholicism would fit on the head of a pin; he'd been raised a hardshell Baptist, and he didn't get to any church very often these days. But Lulu Mattox, without a doubt, was married to the Freedom Party. She gave it a single-minded devotion that put the enthusiasm of any mere Party man to shame. She had all the files at her fingertips, too, for she was the best-organized person Jake had ever met. He didn't know what he would do without her.

  A few minutes later, he went downstairs. Guards outside the building came to attention and saluted. "Freedom!" they said. The uniforms they wore were similar but not quite identical to those of the Confederate Army. The bayoneted Tredegar rifles they carried were Army issue. Someone might have asked questions about that, but the Freedom Party had gone out of its way to show the world that asking questions about it wasn't a good idea.

  "Freedom!" Jake echoed, returning those salutes as if he were a general himself. Part of him loathed the fat fools with the wreathed stars on their collar tabs who'd done so much to help the CSA lose the war. The rest of him wished he had that kind of power himself. I'd do a better job with it than those bastards ever could have.