He sat up in bed, put on his glasses, and swung his feet down to the carpet, still wondering whether he’d passed his own test, hers, or Jake Featherston’s. Through the gauzy curtains on the window, he could see people bustling along the paths in Capitol Square and others lying on the grass in the shade of the trees, doing their best to fight the oppressive weather.
On the sidewalk down below the window, a Negro said, “Spare some change for a hungry man? . . . Spare some change for a hungry man? . . . Spare some change for—? Oh, God bless you, ma’am!”
“I wouldn’t give a nigger a dime,” Anne said coldly. “I wouldn’t give a nigger a penny, by God. If they can’t find work, to hell with them. Let ’em starve.”
Clarence judiciously pursed his lips. “A lot more of them looking for work these days, you know, with tractors and farm machinery driving sharecroppers off the land.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that. So what?” she said. “If they can’t figure out some way or another to make themselves useful, who needs them? The whole country would be better off without them.”
“Would it? I wonder. Who’d do the nigger work without niggers?”
“Machines could do a lot of it, the way they do on a farm,” Anne answered.
“Some of it, anyway,” Clarence admitted. “But where are you going to get a machine that waits on tables or cuts somebody’s hair? If we didn’t have niggers, whites would need to do things like that.” He started getting dressed.
“It could happen,” Anne said stubbornly. “I do all sorts of things for myself I used to have servants do back before the war.”
“I suppose so,” Potter said. “Nigger work must get done in the USA, too, and they don’t have that many niggers to do it. But things are different here. An awful lots of whites here say, ‘I may be poor and stupid, but by God I’m white, and I’m better off than those niggers, and I don’t have to do the things they do.’ ” Slyly, he added, “An awful lot of them vote Freedom, too.”
Anne Colleton didn’t rise to the bait. She just nodded. “I know they do. But if they didn’t have any choice, they’d do what needs doing. If we had another war, we could even make them feel patriotic about doing what needs doing.”
At first, Potter thought that was one of the most monstrously cynical things he’d ever heard, and he’d heard some doozies. Then he realized that, no matter how cynical it was, it probably wasn’t wrong. He leaned over and kissed her. “Do you want to write that down and pass it on to the president, or do you want me to do it?” he asked.
“Whichever you please,” she answered. “But what do you want to bet he’s already thought of it himself?”
Clarence thought it over. He didn’t need to think very long. “I won’t touch that one,” he said. “You’re bound to be right.” Featherston was plenty cynical enough to use patriotism to get people to do what he wanted—and plenty good enough at leading to get them to follow.
“One of us ought to do it,” Anne said, “just on the off chance it hasn’t occurred to him.”
“I’ll take care of it, then,” Potter said, knotting his butternut tie. “Unless you really want to, I mean.”
“No, it’s all right. Go ahead.” Anne laughed. “The funny thing is, here we are, both trying to give him good advice, and he doesn’t trust either one of us as far as he can throw us.”
“We’ve known him too long, and we’ve known him too well, and at one point or another we’ve both stood up and told him no,” Potter said. “That doesn’t happen to him very often, and he doesn’t much like it.”
“True.” Anne laughed again, on a lower, less amused, note. “And now we’re both following his orders even so. Everybody follows his orders these days.”
“He’s the president.” Potter set his shiny-peaked officer’s cap on his head. “He’s the president, and he’s been right. How do you lick a combination like that? As far as I can see, you’re better off joining him.”
Would he have said that before Jake Featherston brought him back into the Army? He knew he wouldn’t. But that was almost four years ago now. And in serving Featherston, he also served his country. His country counted most. So he told himself, and told himself, and. . . .
George Enos carefully coiled the last line that had held Sweet Sue to T Wharf. The fishing boat’s diesel rumbled under his feet. Pungent exhaust poured from the stack. The Sweet Sue began to move, although for the first few seconds it seemed more as if the boat were standing still and the wharf sliding away from it. But then there could be no doubt. The fishing boat was leaving Boston and Boston harbor behind. George let out a slightly hung-over sigh of relief.
He’d been putting to sea for his entire adult life, almost half of his thirty years, but he’d never been so glad to watch his home town slide below the horizon as he had this past year and a little more. If he didn’t have to look at Boston, he didn’t have to be reminded—so much—of the place where that writer son of a bitch had shot his mother and then shot himself. He’d told her Ernie was no goddamn good for her, told her and told her. His sister had told her the same thing. Fat lot of good it did.
I shouldn’t have just talked, he thought for the thousandth time. I should have kicked the crap out of that bastard. His fists clenched. his jaw knotted. His teeth ground. He hadn’t done it, and it was too late now. It would always be too late.
He was so lost in his own gloom, he jumped when somebody clapped him on the back. “How you doin’ Junior?” Johnny O’Shea asked.
“I’m all right, Johnny,” George answered. It wasn’t really true, but the older man couldn’t do anything about what ailed him. Nobody could, not even himself.
“You looked a little green there,” O’Shea said, fiddling with one upturned end of his old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He was a wiry little fellow whose strength and endurance belied his sixty years. He and a few other old-timers who’d known George’s father were the only ones who called him Junior. George didn’t mind. Anything that helped him connect to his old man was welcome. George had only vague memories of him. He’d been just seven when that Confederate submersible sank the USS Ericsson. Before that, his father had been in the Navy or on a fishing boat most of the time.
If the Sweet Sue sinks tomorrow, my kids won’t remember me at all. They’re too little. That was a hell of a cheerful thought with which to put to sea.
He realized he hadn’t answered Johnny. “A little too much beer last night, that’s all,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” Talking about the other would have shown weakness. He refused.
O’Shea’s laugh showed missing teeth, a few stubs stained almost the color of tobacco juice, and a plug of chewing tobacco big enough to choke a Clydesdale. “A little too much beer?” he said. “A little? Sweet Jesus Christ, what a milk-and-cookies lot we’ve raised up to take our places when we’re gone. When I was your age and I’d be going out to sea the next morning, I’d drink till I couldn’t see and fuck till I couldn’t get it up for a month afterwards and let the skipper worry about having me on board when we got going. If you’re gonna do these things, for God’s sake do ’em right.”
George had made sure Connie had something to remember him by, too. That was one of the reasons he hadn’t drunk too much to excess. If you didn’t know who you were, your John Henry wouldn’t know who he was, either.
He was damned if he felt like talking about what he’d done in the bedroom, though. Instead, his voice sly, he asked, “How about last night for you, then?”
“Oh, I got drunk,” O’Shea said. “Take enough aspirins, drink enough coffee, and that ain’t so bad the next day. And I found me a a girl, too. But I’ll tell you something, Junior, and it’s a goddamn fact. Enough fucking so you can’t get it up for the next month is a hell of a lot less when you’re my age than it is when you’re yours.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sea.
A lot of men would have sounded bitter saying something like that. Johnny O’Shea thought it was funny. He slapped George on th
e back and went off to chin with one of the other fishermen.
He got even less in the way of response from Carlo Lombardi than he had from George. Aspirins and coffee might have been enough to beat Johnny’s hangover, but Carlo looked as if he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. Under his perennial five-o’-clock shadow, his face was fishbelly pale. He had a hat jammed down low over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and they were nothing but bloodshot slits. He answered O’Shea in monosyllables, and then stopped answering him at all. Johnny thought that was funny, too. George didn’t. He’d been where Carlo was a few times—well, maybe more than a few times—and he hadn’t enjoyed it a bit.
A couple of the other fishermen looked as much the worse for wear as Lombardi. By the time they got out to the Grand Bank, they’d be sober enough. The only liquor aboard the Sweet Sue was a bottle of medicinal brandy under lock and key in the galley. Every so often, Captain Albert would dole out a nip as a reward for a job well done. Davey Hatton, whose territory the galley was, had also been known to pour out a little brandy every now and then, but that was unofficial, even if the skipper winked at it.
Back in George’s father’s day, most fishing boats leaving T Wharf had made for Georges Bank, about five hundred miles offshore. Some still did, but Georges Bank had been fished so hard for so long, it didn’t yield what it had. The Grand Bank, though, out by Newfoundland, seemed inexhaustible. Some people said Basque fishermen had been taking cod and tuna there since before Columbus discovered America. George Enos didn’t know anything about that one way or the other. He did know there were a hell of a lot of fish left.
Boston sank below the edge of the sea. He wasn’t sorry to see it go, or all the little islands that marked the way into the harbor. A couple of miles off to port, a U.S. Navy minesweeper—not a very big warship, but a giant when measured against fishing boats—opened up with its guns. A few seconds later, a big column of water rose from the Atlantic. The flat, harsh crack of the explosion took ten or twelve seconds to reach the Sweet Sue. When it did, Carlo Lombardi looked as if he wished his head would fall off, or maybe as if it just had.
George felt the blast in his teeth and sinuses, too. Even so, he nodded in satisfaction. “There’s one mine we won’t have to worry about any more,” he muttered. During the war, the USA had mined the approaches to Boston harbor to a faretheewell, to make sure Confederate and British raiders and submarines couldn’t sneak in and raise hell. And the Confederates had sown mines to give U.S. shipping a hard time.
Some of those mines still floated in place. Some of the ones that had been moored came loose with the passage of years and drifted free, a menace to navigation. Fishing boats and the occasional freighter blew up and sank with all hands. Finding mines and disposing of them had kept the Navy hopping since the end of the war.
And how long would it be before the Navy stopped sweeping for mines and started laying them again? George didn’t like the headlines coming out of the states that had changed hands between the CSA and the USA. President Smith was loudly declaring he’d removed the last reasons for war on the North American continent. George hoped he was right. As far as he could see, everybody hoped the president was right.
Gulls glided along overhead. They always followed fishing boats, hoping for handouts from the garbage and offal that went over the side. They did better when the boats were farther out to sea and actually fishing, but that didn’t keep them from being optimistic whenever they saw fishermen.
George stopped in the cramped little galley for a mug of coffee. He took it up to the Sweet Sue’s bow and drank it there. The hot, sweet, creamy brew and the fresh breeze from the fishing boat’s passage helped submerge the last of his headache. His cure wasn’t so drastic as Johnny O’Shea’s, but he hadn’t hurt himself so badly the night before, either.
Going out to the Grand Bank was a long haul. Once the ocean surrounded the Sweet Sue on all sides, she might not have been moving at all. No landscape changed to prove she was. Every so often, she would pass an inbound fishing boat. Captain Albert would get on the wireless then, doing his best to find out exactly where the fish were biting best.
When my old man went to sea, his boat didn’t even have wireless, George thought. He remembered his mother saying his father hadn’t know that crazy Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke till he got back to T Wharf after a fishing trip. And when a Confederate commerce raider captured him and sank his boat, his skipper back then hadn’t been able to yell for help. He’d been interned in North Carolina for months before the Confederates finally let him go.
On George’s first night in the tiny, cramped bunk up at the bow, he tossed and turned and slept very badly. He always did his first night at sea. He’d got used to a bed that didn’t shift under him, to one where he could roll over without falling out, to one where he could sit up suddenly without banging his head—hell, to one with Connie in it, sweet and warm and mostly willing. He knew he’d be all right tomorrow, but tonight was tough.
More coffee persuaded his eyes they really did want to stay open the next morning. He poured in the cream as if there were no tomorrow. So did everybody else. Even on ice, it wouldn’t stay fresh through the cruise, so they enjoyed it while they could. By the same token, Davey Hatton did up enormous plates of scrambled eggs for the fishermen.
“By God, Cookie, yesterday I’d’ve puked these up,” Johnny O’Shea said. “This morning, they’re goddamn good.” He shoveled another forkful into his face.
Hatton was a round, red-faced man with a barbed wit. “If somebody’d lit a match under your nose yesterday, he could’ve used your breath for a blowtorch,” he replied. “Today you’re on your way to remembering your name.”
“Fuck you,” Johnny said sweetly.
The cook nodded. “There—you see? I knew that was it.” The men in the crowded galley laughed. Even Johnny laughed—he knew he’d lost that round.
When the Sweet Sue finally got out to the Grand Bank, there was little more time for laughter. Boats from the USA, the CSA, the Republic of Quebec, occupied Canada and Newfoundland, Britain, Ireland, France, and Portugal bobbed here and there on the ocean. Captain Albert found a place at the edge of one pack of boats and started fishing.
George lost track of how many big hooks he baited with frozen squid. The process was as automatic as breathing for him. If he’d thought about it, he probably would have stuck himself. Every so often, somebody did. Then it was the nasty business of pushing the barb through and snipping it off, the even nastier business of iodine, and, if a man hadn’t had one in a while, a tetanus shot from the first-aid kit. And, with his hand bandaged, he’d go back to fixing hooks.
But when the lines came in . . . when the lines came in, work really started. Gaffing a wriggling tuna that weighed as much as a man, gutting it, kicking the offal over the side, and getting the fish into the ice in the hold went on hour after hour. Sometimes it wouldn’t be a tuna—it would be a tuna head, proof that a shark had found the fish first. Off the hook, over the side. Sometimes a shark would be on the hook. Gaff him, gut him so he stayed dead, and pitch him overboard.
The endless fishing went on for the next three weeks. By then, the Sweet Sue had more than twenty tons of tuna in her hold and rode noticeably lower in the water than she had when she set out from T Wharf. George still didn’t know how good a trip it was. He wouldn’t till the skipper sold the tuna. But he knew he was finally ready to head back to Boston. After all, he had to remind his kids who he was.
Brigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. He felt betrayed not only by the War Department—which would have been nothing tremendously unusual—but also by the entire government of the United States. Having the whole government gang up on him didn’t happen every day.
But Dowling certainly felt it had happened here. He’d come to Covington to help keep Kentucky in the United States. He’d got a good start on doing just that, too. And then Al Smith had jerked the rug out from under him by going to Richmond
and agreeing to a plebiscite. The only way the USA could win that plebiscite would be for Jesus Christ to appear in Louisville and curse Jake Featherston with words that glowed like burning coals—and even then it would be close.
Now, ironically, what Dowling was watching over was the presidential election campaign. Up till Al Smith said there would be a plebiscite after all, he couldn’t have got elected dog catcher in Kentucky. Now Red Socialist posters were everywhere in Covington. They showed Smith’s face and the slogan, THE HAPPY WARRIOR—HE’S KEPT US OUT OF WAR. More went up all the time, too.
The Democrats were running Senator Bob Taft—son of longtime Congressman William Howard Taft—from across the river in Ohio. In a normal year, he would have scored well in conservative Kentucky. This wasn’t a normal year, nor was Kentucky a normal state. The Freedom Party had ambushed the local Democrats from the right, and the Freedom Party, taking its cue from Richmond, was loudly for Smith.
Besides, Taft had denounced the plebiscite. Like most Democrats, he remained in favor of holding on to the gains the USA had made in the Great War. That would have doomed him here anyway.
“Isn’t it grand?” Dowling said at supper one evening. “Kentucky will vote Socialist in February, and then it’ll vote Freedom in January. Tell me how that makes sense.”
All the officers with whom he was eating were junior to him, of course. None of them ventured to claim that it didn’t make sense, or that he was worrying too much. A major did say, “At least the Freedom Party is on its best behavior from now until January.”
“Bully!” Dowling exploded, which made the younger officers look at one another. He caught the looks, and knew why they made them. They didn’t say bully, and they thought only dinosaurs—anyone who remembered the nineteenth century certainly qualified—did. Dowling was too exercised to care. He went on, “Of course those bastards will be on their best behavior. They don’t have to blow things up any more to get what they want. All they have to do is wait. Wouldn’t you be on your best behavior, too?”
The Victorious Opposition Page 54