The Victorious Opposition (30 page)

After Chief Justice Pittman administered the oath of office to President Smith, the jurist sat down. Smith stayed behind the forest of microphones that would send his words to the crowd and take them across the country by wireless. His unruly shock of black hair tried to deny that he was in his early sixties, but his jowls affirmed it.

“Workers and people of the United States, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing me here today.” Al Smith’s voice was raspy and full of New York City. “I have a lot of work to do, and I am going to do it. It is the people’s work, and none is more important.” Applause washed over him. He seemed to grow a couple of inches taller when it did. Nellie had seen that before with other politicians; Teddy Roosevelt and Upton Sinclair had both been the same way.

“Some folks said that because I am a Catholic, that was the kiss of death for my chances.” As was his way, Smith met the issue head-on. Scorn in his voice, he continued, “They used to say the same thing about any Socialist’s chances. What
I
say is, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.”

Nellie joined the startled laughter. Up on the platform, Al Smith grinned. They didn’t call him the Happy Warrior for nothing. “And what I say is, you’ve heard a lot of baloney about what I’ll do and what I won’t, especially about our newest states.” President—no, former President—Hoover squirmed in his seat. Smith went on, “Let’s look at the record. The record shows we won the war and we took Houston and Kentucky away from our Confederate neighbors at gunpoint. We didn’t ask the people who were living there what they thought. We just went ahead and grabbed with both hands. Now we’re paying the piper on account of that.”

Merle Grimes started tapping his cane again—this time, Nellie judged, in anger. She needed a moment to realize Smith hadn’t said a word about Sequoyah. But it was full of Indians, so what difference did that make?

“We have to find some way to straighten things out there,” Smith said. “I don’t know yet what that will be, but I intend to work with President Featherston to learn. If I need to, I will go to Richmond to seek it out.”

For a moment, that didn’t get applause. It got nothing but astonished silence. No president of the United States had ever said anything like it, not in all the years since the Confederate States rammed secession down the USA’s throat. The cheers it did get after that long, amazed beat were all the more fervent because of the preceding surprise.

Nellie didn’t join in them. She had her own ideas about Confederates, and cozying up to them wasn’t one of those ideas. From then on, she stopped listening. Armstrong said to Edna, “Granny’s falling asleep,” but that wasn’t true. She just wasn’t interested any more. She almost told him so—she almost told the obnoxious brat where to go and how to get there—but it didn’t seem worth the effort.

Next thing she remembered, loud clapping made her jump, so maybe her grandson hadn’t been as wrong as she’d thought. Smith was done.
Armstrong’s still obnoxious, though,
she thought, looking around furtively to make sure no one had paid too much attention to her lapse. Her voice was louder and cheerier than it had to be when she said, “Well, let’s go back to my place.”

“All right, Ma.” Edna, by contrast, sounded oddly gentle.

“Are you all right, Ma?” Clara asked.

“I’m fine,” Nellie declared. Then she stood up too quickly, and felt dizzy for a moment.
Oh, for God’s sake,
she thought, mortified.
They’re all going to think I’m nothing but a little old lady.

Merle Grimes steadied her with a strong hand on her elbow. “Don’t worry, Mother Jacobs,” he said. “We’ll get you home just fine.”

“Thank you, Merle,” Nellie said. “You’re a good son-in-law.” Merle smiled. Armstrong made a face. Merle was good and strict with him, and didn’t put up with any guff, the way Edna sometimes did.

When they went back to the coffeehouse above which Nellie had lived for so many years, Edna and Clara both crowded into the kitchen with her as she took a big frying chicken out of the icebox. “Why don’t you let us give you a hand, Ma?” Clara said. Edna nodded.

“You can stick me in a rest home the day I don’t know how to cut up a chicken and put it in hot fat,” Nellie said tartly. Her daughters looked at each other and both started to laugh. With identical shrugs, they retreated.

And then, with almost the first cut she made, Nellie got her own hand on the web between thumb and forefinger. She said something she hadn’t said since her days as a working girl. Armstrong was sitting closest to her. His head came up in astonishment. She glared at him, defying him to make something of it or even to believe he’d heard what he thought he had. He looked away in a hurry.

Satisfied, Nellie went back to work. She didn’t even bother washing her hands, not that it would have done much good when she was still messing with chicken pieces. Once the chicken was dredged in cornmeal and sizzling in the fat, she did rinse off. The wound hadn’t bled much. She forgot about it.

Everyone said the chicken was the best she’d ever made. She thought so, too. It turned out crisp and juicy and not a bit greasy. Clara and Edna insisted that they wash the dishes. Triumphantly full, Nellie let them.

When she woke up a couple of days later with a sore hand, she had trouble even remembering what she’d done to it. Only when she looked down and saw how red and angry the cut looked did she nod to herself and think,
Oh, that’s right—the chicken.
Then she went on about her business, favoring the hand as much as she could.

Clara noticed when she came home from school. “You ought to take that to a doctor, Ma,” she said. “It doesn’t look so good.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Nellie said. “It’ll get better. Besides, who can afford doctors?”

But the hand didn’t get better, and the next day she started feeling weak and hot and run-down. Real alarm in her voice, Clara said, “I’m going to get the doctor over here right now.” Nellie started to tell her not to bother, but then didn’t. She didn’t feel up to it—and besides, Clara was already out the door.

The doctor looked Nellie over, listened to her heart, took her pulse, and took her temperature. “What is it?” Nellie asked, though she was too miserable to care much about the answer.

“It’s 104.4, Mrs. Jacobs,” he said reluctantly. “You have blood poisoning, I’m afraid. It could be . . . serious. Do you understand me?”

When Nellie nodded, the room spun. Even so, she said, “Of course I do.” After a moment, she added, “And the coffee, and the raspberries . . .” Even she had no idea what that meant. She tried to laugh, but didn’t seem to have the strength.

“What do we do?” Clara asked from a million miles away.

“Keep her comfortable. Aspirin, to fight the fever. Soup, water, juice—whatever she can keep down,” the doctor answered, his voice even more distant. “If she beats the infection, she’ll be fine.” He didn’t say what would happen if she didn’t. Clara didn’t ask. Neither did Nellie. She knew. Her body knew, even if the fever clouded her mind.

She remembered very little of the next few days—and less and less as the time went on. In that same dim way, that way beneath consciousness, she knew she was fading, but she’d already faded so far that she had trouble caring. Above her, people seemed to appear and disappear as she drifted in and out of the real world: Clara, Edna, Merle, Armstrong. She would blink, and one would turn to another. It might have been magic.

Once, though, when she saw Edna, she knew there was something she had to say. After a struggle, she found it: “Bill Reach.” Forcing out the name took all the strength she had.

“What is it, Ma?” Tears glinted off Edna’s cheeks.

“Bill Reach,” Nellie repeated, and Edna nodded, so she’d understood. Fighting for every word, Nellie went on, “Killed him. Stuck him.
Fuck
him.”

“What’s she saying?” asked someone off to the side: Armstrong.

“She’s delirious,” Edna said. “There was this crazy man during the war—he was a spy, or something. Hal would’ve known for sure. But she thinks she killed him.”

“Did,” Nellie said, or tried to say, but no one seemed to pay her any mind.
Isn’t that the way it goes?
she thought as lucidity ebbed for the last time.
Isn’t that
just
the way it goes? You tell the truth, and no one believes you.

She felt burning hot, and then cold as the South Pole, and then . . . nothing at all.

“W
here do you have to go today?” Laura asked as Jonathan Moss threw on his overcoat and jammed a wool hat down low on his head. As usual, April in Berlin, Ontario, was spring by the calendar but not by what it was doing outside. The sun shone brightly, but it shone on drifted snow from the storm that had just blown through—and another snowstorm or two might yet follow on the heels of this one.

“London,” he answered, gulping the hot tea she’d set in front of him. Whatever warmth he could seize now would be welcome.

Dorothy’s eyes got big and round. “You’re driving all the way to England, Daddy?” his daughter asked. She was four, an age that seemed startling but not necessarily impossible.

Moss laughed. “No, sweetie—just over to London, here in Ontario. If the roads aren’t clear, though, it’ll seem like it’s as far as England.” He kissed Dorothy and Laura and headed for the door.

“London,” his wife said behind him. “That’s where I used to go when I needed something they didn’t have in Arthur.”

To someone who’d grown up in Chicago, the idea of London, Ontario, as the big city was pretty funny. Jonathan Moss didn’t say so. He knew the things that were likely to spark quarrels with his wife, and tried to steer clear of them. Too many quarrels started out of a clear blue sky for him to want to look for more. Instead, with a wave, he ducked out the door and was gone.

Snow plows had gone over the road that ran west from Berlin. Moss didn’t care to think about what the rock salt the road crews had put down was doing to his undercarriage and his fenders, and so, resolutely, he didn’t. He drove past the military airstrip outside of London and let out a nostalgic sigh. He hadn’t flown an aeroplane since coming home from the Great War. Unlike a lot of fliers, he’d never had the urge. Now, though, it tugged at him.

Tug or no, though, meeting the urge would have to wait. He had a trial scheduled at occupation headquarters in London.

His client, one Morris Metcalfe, was accused of bribing the occupying authorities to look the other way while he did some black-market liquor dealing. Metcalfe was a cadaverous man with none of the bounce and energy Lou Jamieson displayed. Moss suspected he was guilty, but the military prosecutor didn’t have a strong case against him.

Moss made that plain at every turn. At last, the prosecutor, a captain named Gus Landels, complained to the judge: “How can I show he’s guilty if all his lawyer has to do is say he’s innocent?”

“How can I show he’s innocent if all you have to do is say he’s guilty?” Moss retorted, and thought the shot went home.

In the middle of the afternoon, the judge, a lieutenant colonel who looked as if he’d seen far too many cases, pronounced Metcalfe not guilty. Captain Landels looked disgusted. The judge pointed a finger at Morris Metcalfe. He said, “My personal opinion is that there’s more here than meets the eye. I can’t prove that, and you’re probably lucky I can’t. But I won’t be surprised if I see you in this court again, and if you don’t get off so easy.”

Metcalfe looked back out of dead-fish eyes. “I resent that, your Honor,” he said—he’d spent enough time in U.S. courts to know and use the proper form of address.

“I won’t lose any sleep over it,” the judge replied. “Case dismissed—for now.”

After a limp handshake, Metcalfe disappeared with hardly a word of thanks for Moss. Captain Landels, noting that, let out a derisive snort. Moss shrugged. His only worry was extracting the balance of his fee from Metcalfe. But he thought he could do it. Like the judge, he believed the other man would need his services again before too long.

He went out to reclaim his Ford from the secure lot where he’d parked it—like Berlin, London had one. He was starting back to his home town when a flight of five fighting scouts—just plain fighters, they were calling them nowadays—zoomed down to land at the field outside of London.

He almost drove off the road. A block later, he
did
drive off the road—down a side street, toward the airstrip. Those lean, low-winged shapes drew him as a lodestone draws nails. They were as different from the machines he’d flown in the Great War as a thoroughbred was from a donkey. He tried to imagine what one of them would have done to a squadron of his kites. It would have knocked down the whole squadron without getting scratched; he was sure of that.

The rifle-toting guards at the airstrip weren’t inclined to let him enter. His U.S. identification card finally persuaded them, though one rode along to escort him to the commandant’s office. He caught a break there. The man in charge of the field, Major Rex Finley, had served in Ontario during the war. “I remember you,” Finley said. “I was at the party after you made ace. You’d forgotten it was your fifth kill.”

“That’s me,” Moss agreed cheerfully. “I’d forget my own head if my wife didn’t nail it on me every morning.”

Finley chuckled. “I know the feeling. Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Moss?” He bore down on Moss’ civilian title.

“I saw the new fighters coming in for a landing,” Moss said. “They’re . . . quite something.”

“The new Wright 27s? I should say so.” Finley rubbed at his mustache, a thin strip of dark hair clinging tight to his upper lip. “And?”

“Could I sit in one?” The naked longing in Moss’ voice startled even him. He hadn’t felt anything like that since he’d fallen for Laura Secord long before she fell for him. “Please?”

Major Finley frowned. “I shouldn’t. It’s against about half a pound of regulations, and you know it as well as I do.” Moss didn’t say anything. He’d done all the pleading he could do if he wanted to keep his self-respect. The field commandant made a fist and smacked it into his other hand. “Come on. Officially, you know, you don’t exist. You were never here. Got it?”