The Victorious Opposition (17 page)

A couple of blocks from the headquarters, he ran into Braxton Donovan, who was heading in the same direction. The lawyer nodded. He had more patience with Potter than most local Whigs did.

“How goes it, shyster?” Potter asked. “They still haven’t decided to call you a political and run you in?”

“Not yet,” Donovan answered. He was a ruddy, fleshy man with an impressive pompadour. “Of course, now that the Supreme Court is gone, they’re liable to get rid of all the others next, and then where will I be?”

“Up the creek,” Potter answered, and Braxton Donovan ruefully nodded. Potter went on, “Why couldn’t people see it’s a damnfool thing to do, electing a party that said ahead of time it wouldn’t play by the rules once it got in?”

“Because too many people don’t care,” Donovan said. He pulled out his pocket watch. Carrying one made him on the old-fashioned side—a typical attitude for a Whig. Potter, following postwar fashion, preferred a wristwatch. Donovan said, “We’re early. You want to stop at the saloon across the street and hoist a couple?”

“Twist my arm,” Potter said, holding it out. Donovan did, not too hard. “I give up,” Potter announced at once. “Let’s hoist a couple.”

But when they turned the corner, they found a line of gray-uniformed policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts in white and butternut, the cops with drawn pistols—a couple of them had submachine guns instead—and the stalwarts with bludgeons, stretched in front of the entrance to the Whig meeting hall. Angry Whigs milled about on the sidewalk and in the street, but nobody was going inside.

“What the hell’s going on?” Potter said. Against a dozen policemen and twice that many stalwarts, the pistol under his left arm suddenly seemed a lot less important.

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” Braxton Donovan strode forward. In his fullest, roundest, plummiest courtroom voice, he demanded, “What is the meaning of this?”

One of the cops pointed a submachine gun at the lawyer’s belly. Donovan stopped, most abruptly. A burst from a weapon like that could cut him in half. The policeman said, “No more political meetings. That there’s our orders, and that there’s what we’re gonna make sure of.”

“But you can’t do that,” Donovan protested. “It’s against every law on the books.”

“Braxton . . .” Potter said urgently. He took his friend’s arm.

Donovan shook him off. “You want to listen to this other feller here,” the cop said. This time, he didn’t point the submachine gun—he aimed it. “By order of the governor in the interest of public safely, all political meetings except for the Freedom Party’s are banned till after the election.”

One of the stalwarts added, “And for as long as we feel like after that, too.” Several of his buddies laughed.

Potter wondered whether Donovan would have a stroke right there on the spot. “Good God, are you people nuts?” the lawyer said. “I can go to Judge Shipley and get an injunction to stop this nonsense in thirty seconds flat. And
then
I file the lawsuits.”

He was plainly convinced he had the big battalions on his side. The policeman, just as plainly, was convinced he didn’t. So were the stalwarts. With a nasty grin, the one who’d spoken before said, “Judge Shipley resigned last night. Reasons of health.” He leered.

What was going on had got through to Clarence Potter a little while before. The old rules didn’t hold any more. In the new ones, the Freedom Party held—had grabbed—all the high cards. He watched Braxton Donovan figure that out. Donovan had been red, almost purple. Now he went deathly pale. “You wait till after the election,” he whispered. “The people won’t stand for this. They’ll throw you out on your ear.”

The policeman’s finger twitched on the trigger of the submachine gun. Donovan flinched. The cop laughed. So did the Freedom Party stalwarts, in their crisp not-quite-uniforms. One of them said, “You don’t get it, do you, pal? We
are
the people.”

“I am going to declare this here an illegal assembly,” the policeman said. “If you folks don’t disperse, we
will
arrest you. Jails are crowded places these days. A lot of you big talkers end up in ’em for a lot longer than y’all expect. Run along now, or you’ll be sorry.”

Across the street and into the saloon counted as dispersing. Potter ordered a double gin and tonic, Braxton Donovan a double whiskey. “They can’t do that,” he said, tossing back the drink.

“They just did,” Clarence Potter observed. “Question is, what can we do about it?”

Another Whig who’d taken refuge in the saloon said, “We’ve got to fight back.”

“Not here,” the bartender said. “You start talking politics in here, I get in trouble. I don’t want no trouble. I don’t want no trouble with nobody. Neither does the owner. You keep quiet about that stuff or I got to throw y’all out.”

“This is how it goes,” Potter said.

“How what goes?” Donovan asked.

“How the country goes—down the drain,” Potter said. “The Freedom Party is doing its best to make sure we don’t have elections any more—or, if we do, they don’t mean anything. Its best is pretty goddamn good, too.” He spoke in a low voice, in deference to the harassed-looking barkeep. Even that was an accommodation to what the Freedom Party had already accomplished.

Donovan snorted. “They won’t get away with it. And when they do lose an election, there won’t be enough jails to hold all of them, not even at the rate they’re building.”

“I hope you’re right. I hope so, but I wouldn’t count on it,” Potter said. “Jake Featherston worries me. He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s a shrewd son of a bitch. The way he went after the Supreme Court . . . People will be studying that one for the next fifty years. Pass a law that’s popular but unconstitutional, make the Court make the first move, and then land on it with both feet. Nobody much has complained since, not that I’ve heard.”

“Who would dare, with the stalwarts ready to beat you if you try?”

But Potter shook his head. “It’s more than that. If he’d really riled people when he did it, they would scream. They’d do more than scream. They’d stand up on their hind legs and tell him to go to hell. But they don’t. Going ahead with that river project has given thousands of people jobs. It’s given millions of people hope—hope for electricity, hope the rivers won’t wash away their farms and their houses. They care more about that than they do about whether the bill’s constitutional.”

“Nonsense,” Braxton Donovan said. “What could be more important than that?”

“You’re a lawyer, Braxton,” Potter answered patiently. “Think of ordinary people, farmers and factory hands. You ask them, they’d say staying dry and getting electric lights count for more. There are lots of them. And they vote Freedom.”

“Even assuming you’re right—which I don’t, but assuming—what are we supposed to do about it?” Donovan asked. “You’ve got all the answers, so of course you’ve got that one, too, right?”

Potter stared down at his drink as if he’d never seen it before. He gulped the glass dry, then waved to the bartender for a refill. Only after he’d got it did he say, “Damn you, Braxton.”

“Well, I love you, too,” Donovan replied. “You didn’t answer my question, you know.”

“Yes, I do know that,” Potter said gloomily. “I also know I don’t have any answers for you. Nobody in the country has any answers for you.”

“All right. As long as we understand each other.” Donovan finished his second drink, then got to his feet. “I don’t want another one after this. I just want to go home. That’s about what we have left to us these days—our homes, I mean. They’re still our castles . . . for the time being.” He slipped out the door. It had grown dark outside, but not nearly so dark as Potter’s mood.

What do we do? What can we do?
The questions buzzed against his mind like trapped flies buzzing against a windowpane. Like the flies, he saw no way out. Even fighting the Freedom Party looked like a bad idea. Featherston’s followers had been fighters from the start. They were better at it than the Whigs, much better at it than the Radical Liberals.

If we can’t fight them, and if they do whatever they please, no matter how illegal it is, to get what they want, what’s left for us?
Buzz, buzz, buzz: another good question with no good answer visible.

“Maybe he’ll go too far,” Potter muttered. “Maybe he’ll land us in a war with the United States. That’d fix him.”

He despised the USA as much as any man in the CSA. That he could imagine the United States in the role of savior to the Confederate States said a lot about how he felt about the Freedom Party. None of what it said was good.

Two tall gins were plenty to make him feel wobbly on his pins when he rose from the barstool. A fellow in overalls came in just then and sat down at the bar. He ordered a beer. As the bartender drew it for him, he said, “ ‘Bout time they’re shutting down those goddamn Whigs. Mess they got the country into, they ought to thank their lucky stars they aren’t all hangin’ from lamp posts.”

That was a political opinion, too, but the barkeep didn’t tell him to keep quiet. It was, of course, a political opinion favorable to the Freedom Party. In the CSA these days, who could get in trouble for an opinion like that?

If Potter had had another gin in him, he would have called the bartender on it. If he’d had another couple of gins in him, he would have started a fight. But if he fought with every idiot he met in a saloon, he’d end up dead before too long. He went home instead. The cops didn’t arrest him. The stalwarts didn’t pound on him. In the CSA these days, that counted for freedom.

V

S
ylvia Enos and Ernie lay side by side on her bed. He was as rigid as he would have been some hours after death. By the look on his face, he wished he were dead. “It is no good,” he said, glaring straight up at the ceiling. “It is no goddamn good at all.”

“Not tonight, sweetheart,” Sylvia said. “But sometimes it is. Things don’t always work perfect for a woman every time, either, you know.”

“But I am a man. Sort of a man. A piece of a man.” He raised up on one elbow to look down at himself. “A missing piece of a man. Times like this, I want to blow my brains out. One of these days . . .”

“You stop that.” Sylvia put a hand over his mouth. Then, as if fearing that wasn’t enough to drive such thoughts from his mind, she took the hand away and kissed him instead. “Don’t be stupid, you hear me?”

“Is it stupid to want to be a man? Is it stupid to want to do what men can do?” He answered his own question by shaking his head. “I do not think so.”

“It’s stupid to talk that way. This . . . this is just one of those things, like . . . I don’t know, like a bad leg, maybe. You have to make the best of it and do what you can to live your life. Sometimes things
are
all right, you know.”

“Not often enough,” he said. “It is not you, sweetheart. You do everything you know how to do. But it is no damn use. I might as well try to drive a nail with half the handle of a hammer. A wound like this is not like a leg. It goes to the heart of a man, to what
makes
him a man. And if it is not,
he
is not.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about, either,” Sylvia said. “All I know is, you’re scaring me.” George had never scared her. Infuriated her, yes, when he wanted other women after being away from her too long. But she could understand that, no matter how mad it made her. It was . . . Her mind groped till she found the word. It was normal, was what it was. It had none of the darkness that made Ernie’s furious gloom so frightening.

Naked, he got to his feet and headed for the kitchen. “Christ, but I need a drink.”

“Fix me one, too,” Sylvia said.

“All right. I need my pipe, too. Cigarettes are not the same.” Ernie never smoked the pipe in Sylvia’s apartment. Cigarettes were all right, because she smoked, too. But pipe tobacco would have made the place smell funny to Mary Jane when she got home.

“Thanks,” Sylvia said when he brought her whiskey over ice.

He gulped his, still in that black mood. “For a long time after I got wounded, I could not do anything with a woman,” he said, his voice hard and flat. “Not anything. A dead man could do more. I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to! But I could not.”

“Ernie,” she said nervously, “wouldn’t it be better
not
to think about . . . about the bad times?”

She might as well have saved her breath. He went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “I bought a rifle. I went hunting. I hunted and hunted. I shot more kinds of animals than you can think of. Sometimes, if you cannot love, killing will do.”

“I told you once to cut that out,” Sylvia said. “I’m going to tell you again. I don’t like it when you talk that way. I don’t like it a bit.”

“Do you think I like what happened to me? Do you think I like what does not happen with me?” Ernie laughed a strange, harsh laugh. “If you do, you had better think again. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

That sounded like poetry, not quite like the way he usually talked. But Sylvia didn’t know what it was from, and she was damned if she would ask him. She said, “You’re the first man I’ve cared about since the Confederates killed my husband. If you think I’m going to let you get away,
you’d
better think again.”

“If I decide to go, nobody will stop me.” Somber pride rang in Ernie’s voice. “Not you, not anybody. Do you know something?”

“What?” she asked warily.

“I am jealous of you. I am more jealous of you than I know how to say.”

“Of me? How come?”

“You had your revenge. You went to the Confederate States. You knocked on Roger Kimball’s door. When he opened it, you shot him. Your husband can rest easy.”

You were never a seaman,
Sylvia thought. Like most sailors, George Enos had had a horror of dying at sea, of having his body end up food for fish and crabs. He’d had the horror, and then it had happened to him. Yes, she’d avenged herself, but poor George would never rest easy.

Ernie added, “I can never have my revenge. I do not know which English pilot shot me. He may not know he shot me. It was war, and I was a target. He went on his way afterwards. I hope he got shot down. I hope he burned all the way. But even then, it would be over for him. I go on, a quarter of a man.”

“You’re more of a man than you think you are.” Sylvia pressed herself against him. “Do you think I’d want you to stay with me if you didn’t make me happy?”

“Carpet munching,” he muttered. “A bull dyke could do it better than I can.”

“But that’s not what I want,” Sylvia said. “What I want is you, and you’re plenty of man for me.” If he really believed it, maybe he wouldn’t be quite so ready to blow his brains out.

He was mule-stubborn, though. “I am not plenty of man for
me
, sweetheart.” He finished the drink, got out of bed, got dressed, and left her apartment without another word and without a backwards glance. She wondered why that didn’t infuriate her, as it would have if some different man had done it. She couldn’t say. All she knew was, it didn’t.

As things turned out, she was glad Ernie left, because she got a knock on the door about fifteen minutes later. She was in a housecoat by then, washing out the glasses that had held whiskey so she could put them away and so Mary Jane wouldn’t notice they’d been out. She’d already dumped Ernie’s cigarette butts down to the bottom of the wastepaper basket.

“Who is it?” she called, wondering if a neighbor wanted to chat or to borrow something. It was a little late for that, but not impossibly so.

“It’s me—George.” The voice was eerily like her dead husband’s. She’d thought so ever since George Jr. went from a boy to a man.

She hurried to open the door. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you with Connie? Did you get drunk when your boat came back to T Wharf, and think you still live here instead of with your wife?”

“No, Ma. I just had a couple of drinks,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes at her.
Good,
she thought.
He’s less likely to notice the booze on my breath.
He went on, “I know where I live and all just fine. I’ll go back there soon enough, too. But I wanted to stop by and say hello. You raised me, after all.”

He was a big man, bigger than Ernie, wide-shouldered and solid and not at all inclined to talk frightening nonsense. How had he got so big? Hadn’t he been a little boy raising hell in the Coal Board offices just a few months ago? So it seemed to her, anyhow. Slowly, she answered, “I must have done something right back then. I couldn’t ask for a better son.”

“Aw, Ma.” Now she’d embarrassed him—easier when whiskey helped make him maudlin. He paused for a moment, then went on, “I want you to be happy. Mary Jane and I both want you to be happy.”

“You both make me happy,” Sylvia said. “You make me very happy.”

“That’s good, Ma.” George Jr. hesitated again. “If . . . if you was to meet a fella who made you happy, neither one of us’d mind or anything. We talked it over one time. If he was a nice fella, I mean.”

How much did they know about Ernie? Did they know anything? Sylvia thought Mary Jane might. Her daughter had never caught him here (though she’d come close a couple of times), but Sylvia wouldn’t have been surprised if the neighbors gossiped. What were neighbors good for besides gossiping?

And how to answer George Jr.? Carefully, that was how. Sylvia said, “Well, that’s sweet of both of you. If I find somebody like that, I’ll remember what you said.” She shook her head. She needed to tell him a little more: “You know, I’m a grownup myself. If I want to look for a fellow, I don’t really need anybody’s permission to go ahead and do it.”

“Oh, no. I know that. I didn’t mean you did. I just meant . . . you know. That we aren’t upset or anything.”

Not
that we wouldn’t be upset
. They did know, then. Or they knew something, anyhow. Sylvia doubted they knew some of the things she’d been doing not too long before. Children always had trouble imagining their parents doing anything like that. And they wouldn’t know how Ernie was mutilated and some of the makeshifts Sylvia and he had to use.

“As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters,” George Jr. said.

“I am, dear,” she answered.
Most of the time I am, anyhow. When Ernie starts talking about guns—that’s a different story.

“All right, Ma.” Her son stooped and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to go on home. I hope they give me a little time before I have to head out again, but you never can tell.” He touched the brim of his low, flat cap and ducked out of the apartment where he’d grown up, the apartment that would never be his home again.

The next morning, Sylvia left Mary Jane, who’d come in late, in bed asleep and went down to T Wharf to see what she could get in the way of seafood. With her husband and her son both fishermen, she had connections ordinary people could only envy. She bought some lovely scrod at a price that would have turned an ordinary housewife green, and, better yet, got the young cod without any jokes about the pluperfect subjunctive. She didn’t know how many times she’d heard those from fish dealers and fishermen. She did know it was too many.

She was on her way back to the flat when someone called her name. She turned. “Oh,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Kennedy.”

“Good morning to you, Mrs. Enos.” As always, Joseph Kennedy’s smile displayed too many teeth. It was not a friendly smile; it looked more like a threat. “So you prefer a hack writer to me, do you?”

“Ernie’s no hack!” Sylvia said indignantly.

“Anyone who writes an ‘as-told-to’ book is a hack,” Kennedy said, still smiling. He wanted to wound with those teeth; he wanted to bite. That Sylvia had said no to him was bearable as long as she said no to everyone else, too. That she’d said no to him and yes to somebody else . . . that irked him.

“He’s a fine writer,” Sylvia said. “Times are hard. Everybody’s got to eat.”

“Yes.” Kennedy made the word into a hiss. “Everybody does. The campaign will start early next year, since President Hoover’s going to run for reelection. You would have had a part in it, but. . . .” He shrugged. “You’d sooner have half a man.”

Sylvia wanted to slap him in the face with a scrod. Instead, in a deadly voice, she answered, “Half of him makes a better man, and a bigger man, than all of you.”

He went fishbelly pale under the brim of his boater. Sylvia hadn’t bothered keeping quiet. Several people sniggered. A woman pointed at Kennedy. He fled. Sylvia knew she’d pay later, but oh, triumph was sweet for now.

T
he Alabama Correctional Camp (P) lay in the Black Belt, the cotton-growing part of the state, forty miles south of Montgomery and a hundred forty south of Birmingham. Except for his time in the Confederate Army and his stint down in the Empire of Mexico, Jefferson Pinkard had never been so far from home. The camp lay between cotton fields and pecan groves not far from a town of about a thousand people called Fort Deposit. Once upon a time, the fort had protected settlers from Indians. Now only the name was left to commemorate the stockade that had once stood there.

Fort Deposit did boast a train station, a little clapboard building with a roof that hung out over the track so people could board and leave a train when it was raining. And raining it was when Pinkard stood on the rickety platform by the track waiting for the northbound Louisville and Nashville Railroad train to take him up to Birmingham. He wore his warden’s uniform, his Freedom Party pin on proud display on his left lapel. He kept hoping someone would want to argue politics, but nobody did.

Up chugged the train. It wheezed to a halt, iron wheels squealing against iron rails. Most of the people who got off and boarded were Negroes with work-weary faces and cardboard luggage. A couple of cars up at the front of the train were for whites, though. Jeff climbed in and sat down in one of those. A few minutes later, the train rattled north again.

Five hours later, the train came into the Louisville and Nashville station in Birmingham. The station was at Twentieth and Morris, only a few blocks west of the Sloss Works, where Pinkard had worked for so long. He took a cab back to his apartment closer to the center of town. The Freedom Party was picking up a good part of the tab for the place.

He didn’t stay there long—only long enough to get out of uniform and into the white shirt and butternut trousers of a Freedom Party stalwart. He wasn’t the only one wearing that almost-uniform who converged on Birmingham Party headquarters. Oh, no—far from it.

Inside Caleb Briggs had already started talking, warming up the men for what they would be doing. “Tomorrow is election day,” rasped the dentist who headed the Party in Birmingham. His voice was only a ruin of its former self; he’d been gassed in the war, and he’d never recovered. “We got to make sure the fellows who get elected vote our way.
All
of ’em, y’all hear me?”

“Freedom!” the men roared, Pinkard loud among them.

Briggs nodded. “That’s right. Freedom. We’ve already got the House in Richmond, and we’ll keep it. But we got to get the Senate, too, and that’s tougher, on account of the state legislatures pick the Senators. So we have to take care of those. Y’all reckon we can do it?”

“Yes!” the stalwarts shouted, and, “Hell, yes!” and a great many other things besides. The louder they yelled, the more excited they got.

“Good.” Caleb Briggs grinned a wide, crooked grin. “Not so many Whig and Rad Lib gatherings as there used to be. But the Whigs are holding one tonight in Capitol Park, smack in the middle of town. We got to make sure they don’t go through with it, and that they don’t do any voting tomorrow. Make sure you grab your clubs and whatnot, and we aren’t going there to take prisoners.”