Blood and Iron (2 page)

When the Great War ended, Jake Featherston had thought the silence falling over the battlefield as strange and unnatural as machine-gun fire in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon. Now, sitting at the bar of a saloon in the Confederate capital a few weeks later, he listened to the distant rattle of a machine gun, nodded to himself, and took another pull at his beer.

“Wonder who they’re shooting at this time,” the barkeep remarked before turning away to pour a fresh whiskey for another customer.

“Hope it’s the niggers.” Jake set a hand on the grip of the artilleryman’s pistol he wore on his belt. “Wouldn’t mind shooting a few myself, by Jesus.”

“They shoot back these days,” the bartender said.

Featherston shrugged. People had called him a lot of different things during the war, but nobody had ever called him yellow. The battery of the First Richmond Howitzers he’d commanded had held longer and retreated less than any other guns in the Army of Northern Virginia. “Much good it did me,” he muttered. “Much good it did anything.” He’d still been fighting the damnyankees from a good position back of Fredericksburg, Virginia, when the Confederate States finally threw in the sponge.

He went over to the free-lunch counter and slapped ham and cheese and pickles on a slice of none-too-fresh bread. The bartender gave him a pained look; it wasn’t the first time he’d raided the counter, nor the second, either. He normally didn’t give two whoops in hell what other people thought, but this place was right around the corner from the miserable little room he’d found. He wanted to be able to keep coming here.

Reluctantly, he said, “Give me another beer, too.” He pulled a couple of brown dollar banknotes out of his pocket and slid them across the bar. Beer had only been a dollar a glass when he got into town (or a quarter in specie). Before the war, even through most of the war, it had only been five cents.

As long as he was having another glass, he snagged a couple of hard-boiled eggs from the free-lunch spread to go with his sandwich. He’d eaten a lot of saloon free lunches since coming home to Richmond. They weren’t free, but they were the cheapest way he knew to keep himself fed.

A couple of rifle shots rang out, closer than the machine gun had been. “Any luck at all, that’s the War Department,” Jake said, sipping at the new beer. “Lot of damn fools down there nobody’d miss.”

“Amen,” said the fellow down the bar who was drinking whiskey. Like Featherston, he wore butternut uniform trousers with a shirt that had seen better days (though his, unlike Jake’s, did boast a collar). “Plenty of bastards in there who don’t deserve anything better than a blindfold and a cigarette, letting us lose the war like that.”

“Waste of cigarettes, you ask me, but what the hell.” Jake took another pull at his beer. It left him feeling generous. In tones of great concession, he said, “All right, give ’em a smoke.
Then
shoot ’em.”

“Plenty of bastards in Congress, too,” the bartender put in. He was plump and bald and had a white mustache, so he probably hadn’t been in the trenches or just behind them. Even so, he went on in tones of real regret: “If they hadn’t fired on the marchers in Capitol Square last week, reckon we might have seen some proper housecleaning.”

Featherston shook his head. “Wouldn’t matter for beans, I say.”

“What do you mean, it wouldn’t matter?” the whiskey-drinking veteran demanded. “Stringing a couple dozen Congressmen to lampposts wouldn’t matter? Go a long way toward making things better,
I
think.”

“Wouldn’t,” Jake said stubbornly. “Could hang ’em all, and it wouldn’t matter. They’d go and pick new Congressmen after you did, and who would they be? More rich sons of bitches who never worked a day in their lives or got their hands dirty. Men of good family.” He loaded that with scorn. “Same kind of jackasses they got in the War Department, if you want to hear God’s truth.”

He was not anyone’s notion of a classical orator, with graceful, carefully balanced sentences and smooth, elegant gestures: he was skinny and rawboned and awkward, with a sharp nose, a sharper chin, and a harsh voice. But when he got rolling, he spoke with an intensity that made anyone who heard him pay attention.

“What do you reckon ought to happen, then?” the barkeep asked.

“Tear it all down,” Jake said in tones that brooked no argument. “Tear it down and start over. Can’t see what in God’s name else to do, not when the
men of good family
”—he sneered harder than ever—“let the niggers rise up and then let ’em into the Army to run away from the damnyankees and then gave ’em the vote to say thank-you. Christ!” He tossed down the last of the beer and stalked out.

He’d fired canister at retreating Negro troops—and, as the rot spread through the Army of Northern Virginia, at retreating white troops, too. It hadn’t helped. Nothing had helped.
We should have licked the damnyankees fast,
he thought.
A long war let them pound on us till we broke.
He glared in the direction of the War Department.
Your fault. Not the soldiers’fault. Yours.

He tripped on a brick and almost fell. Cursing, he kicked it toward the pile of rubble from which it had come. Richmond was full of rubble, rubble and ruins. U.S. bombing aeroplanes had paid repeated nighttime visits over the last year of the war. Even windows with glass in them were exceptions, not the rule.

Negro laborers with shovels cleared bricks and timbers out of the street, where one faction or another that had sprung up since the war effort collapsed had built a barricade. A soldier with a bayoneted Tredegar kept them working. Theoretically, Richmond was under martial law. In practice, it was under very little law of any sort. Discharged veterans far outnumbered men still under government command, and paid them no more heed than they had to.

Three other Negroes strode up the street toward Jake. They were not laborers. Like him, they wore a motley mix of uniforms and civilian clothing. Also like him, they were armed. Two carried Tredegars they hadn’t turned in at the armistice; the third wore a holstered pistol. They did not look like men who had run from the Yankees. They did not look like men who would run from anything.

Their eyes swept over Jake. He was not a man who ran from anything, either. He walked through them instead of going around. “Crazy white man,” one of them said as they walked on. He didn’t keep his voice down, but he didn’t say anything directly to Jake, either. With his own business on his mind, Jake kept walking.

He passed by Capitol Square. He’d slept under the huge statue of Albert Sidney Johnston the night he got into Richmond. He couldn’t do that now: troops in sandbagged machine-gun nests protected the Confederate Capitol from the Confederate people. Neatly printed
NO LOITERING
signs had sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Several bore handwritten addenda:
THIS MEANS YOU
. Bloodstains on the sidewalk underscored the point.

Posters covered every wall. The most common showed the Stars and Bars and the phrase,
PEACE, ORDER, PROSPERITY
. That one, Featherston knew, came from the government’s printing presses. President Semmes and his flunkies remained convinced that, if they said everything was all right, it would be all right.

Black severed chains on red was another often-repeated theme. The Negroes’ Red uprisings of late 1915 had been crushed, but Reds remained.
JOIN US
! some of the posters shouted—an appeal from black to white.

“Not likely,” Jake said, and spat at one of those posters. No more than a handful of Confederate whites had joined the revolutionaries during the uprisings. No more than a handful would ever join them. Of so much Featherston was morally certain.

Yet another poster showed George Washington and the slogan,
WE NEED A NEW REVOLUTION
. Jake spotted only a couple of copies of that one, which was put out by the Freedom Party. Till that moment, Jake had never heard of the Freedom Party. He wondered if it had existed before the war ended.

He studied the poster. Slowly, he nodded. “Sure as hell do need a new revolution,” he said. He had no great use for Washington, though. Washington had been president of the United States. That made him suspect in Jake’s eyes.

But in spite of the crude illustration, in spite of the cheap printing, the message struck home, and struck hard. The Freedom Party sounded honest, at any rate. The ruling Whigs were trying to heal an amputation with a sticking plaster. The Radical Liberals, as far as he was concerned, played the same song in a different key. As for the Socialists—he spat at another red poster. Niggers and nigger-lovers, every one of them. The bomb-throwing maniacs wanted a revolution, too, but not the kind the country needed.

He peered more closely at the Freedom Party poster. It didn’t say where the party headquarters were or how to go about joining. His lip curled. “Goddamn amateurs,” he said. One thing spending his whole adult life in the Army had taught him: the virtue of organization.

With a shrug, he headed back toward his mean little room. If the Freedom Party didn’t know how to attract any members, odds were it wasn’t worth joining. No matter how good its ideas, they didn’t matter if nobody could find out about them. Even the damned Socialists knew that much.

“Too bad,” he muttered. “Too stinking bad.” Congressional elections were coming this fall. A shame the voters couldn’t send the cheaters and thieves in the Capitol the right kind of message.

Back in the room—he’d had plenty of more comfortable bivouacs on campaign—he wrote for a while in a Gray Eagle scratch-pad. He’d picked up the habit toward the end of the war.
Over Open Sights,
he called the work in progress. It let him set down some of his anger on paper. Once the words were out, they didn’t fester quite so much in his mind. He might have killed somebody if he hadn’t had a release like this.

When day came, he went out looking for work. Colored laborers weren’t the only ones clearing rubble in Richmond, not by a long chalk. He hauled bricks and dirt and chunks of broken stone from not long after sunrise to just before sunset. The straw-boss, of course, paid off in paper money, though his own pockets jingled.

Knowing the banknotes would be worth less tomorrow than they were today, Jake made a beeline for the local saloon and the free-lunch counter. He’d drawn better rations in the Army, too, but he was too hungry to care. As before, the barkeep gave him a reproachful look for making a pig of himself. As before, he bought a second beer to keep the fellow happy, or not too unhappy.

He was stuffing a pickled tomato into his mouth when the fellow with whom he’d talked politics the day before came in and ordered himself a shot. Then he made a run at the free lunch, too. They got to talking again; Featherston learned his name was Hubert Slattery. After a while, Jake mentioned the Freedom Party posters he’d seen.

To his surprise, Slattery burst out laughing. “Oh, them!” he said. “My brother took a look at those fellows, but he didn’t want any part of ’em. By what Horace told me, there’s only four or five of ’em, and they run the whole party out of a shoebox.”

“But they’ve got posters and everything,” Jake protested, startled to find how disappointed he was. “Not
good
posters, mind you, but posters.”

“Only reason they do is that one of ’em’s a printer,” the other veteran told him. “They meet in this little dive on Seventh near Canal, most of the way toward the Tredegar Steel Works. You want to waste your time, pal, go see ’em for yourself.”

“Maybe I will,” Featherston said. Hubert Slattery laughed again, but that just made him more determined. “By God, maybe I will.”

Congresswoman Flora Hamburger clapped her hands together in delight. Dr. Hanrahan’s smile was broader than a lot of those seen at the Pennsylvania Hospital. And David Hamburger, intense concentration on his face, brought his cane forward and then took another step on his artificial leg.

“How does it feel?” Flora asked her younger brother.

“Stump’s not too sore,” he answered, panting a little. “But it’s harder work than I thought it would be.”

“You haven’t been upright since you lost your leg,” Dr. Hanrahan reminded him. “Come on. Give me another step. You can do it.” David did, and nearly fell. Hanrahan steadied him before Flora could. “You’ve got to swing the prosthesis out, so the knee joint locks and takes your weight when you straighten up on it,” the doctor said. “You don’t learn that, the leg won’t work. That’s why everybody with an amputation above the knee walks like a sailor who hasn’t touched land in a couple of years.”

“But you
are
walking, David,” Flora said. She dropped from English into Yiddish:
“Danken Gott dafahr. Omayn.”

Seeing her brother on his feet—or on one foot of his and one of wood and metal and leather—did a little to ease the guilt that had gnawed at her ever since he was wounded. Nothing would ever do more than a little. After her New York City district sent her to Congress, she’d had the chance to slide David from the trenches to a quiet post behind the lines. He wouldn’t have wanted her to do that, but she could have. She’d put Socialist egalitarianism above family ties…and this was the result.