Walk in Hell (23 page)

But then, the world already seemed to have gone mad.

Here and there, among the eagles and the handsome men in green-gray and the women who had to be their wives or mothers, Socialist Party posters managed to find space. Keeping them up there wasn’t easy. As fast as boys went round with pastepots and brushes, Soldiers’ Circle men followed, tearing down anything that might contradict what TR wanted people to think today.

PEACE AND JUSTICE
, one of the Socialist posters said.
A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE WORKER
, shouted another. A good many copies of that one stayed up; some of the Soldiers’ Circle goons took it for a government-issued poster. Stealing the opposition’s slogan was always a good idea.

Fewer Soldiers’ Circle men prowled the Centre Market than was usually so. And, most uncommonly, none loitered in front of Max Fleischmann’s butcher shop. Fleischmann was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shop when Flora came up. “Good morning, my dear,” he said with Old World courtliness. He was a Democrat himself, which didn’t keep the government goons from giving him a hard time. With his shop right under Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party headquarters, it was guilt by association in the most literal sense of the words.

“Good morning, Mr. Fleischmann,” Flora answered. “How are you today?”

“Today, not so bad,” the butcher answered. “Last night—” He rolled his eyes. “You’ve seen the ‘turn in old grease’ posters?” After pausing to see if Flora would nod, he went on, “Last night, just as I was closing up shop, one of those Soldiers’ Circle
mamzrim
brought in a gallon tin—of lard.”

“Oy!”
Flora exclaimed. That was more nastily clever than the Soldiers’ Circle usually managed to be. A gallon of pig’s fat in a kosher butcher shop…

“
Oy
is right,” Fleischmann agreed mournfully. “Thank God I had no customers just then. I shut the shop and brought my rabbi over. The place is ritually clean again, but even so—”

“I can complain to the City Council about that kind of harassment, if you’d like me to,” Flora said.

But the butcher shook his head. “Better not. If one of them does it one time, a
kholeriyeh
on him and life goes on. If you give the idea to a whole great lot of them, it will happen over and over for the next six months. No, better not.”

“It shouldn’t be like that,” Flora said. But she’d spent enough time as an activist to know the difference between what should have been and what was. Shaking her head in sad sympathy with Max Fleischmann, she went upstairs.

People were still coming into the Socialist Party offices, which meant the chaos wasn’t so bad as it would be later in the day. She had time to get a glass of tea, pour sugar into it, and catch up on a little paperwork before the telephones started going mad.

“How are you this morning?” Maria Tresca asked.

“I’ve been worse—little Yossel slept through the whole night,” Flora answered. “But I’ve been better, too.” She explained what the Soldiers’ Circle man had done to Max Fleischmann.

Maria was Catholic, but she’d spent enough time among Jews to understand what lard in the butcher shop meant. “It’s an outrage,” she snapped. “And he probably went out to a saloon and got drunk afterwards, laughing about it.”

“Probably just what he did,” Flora agreed. “Anyone who could think of anything so vile, he should walk in front of a train.”

Herman Bruck walked in just then. Flora wished fleetingly that he would walk in front of a train, too. But no, that wasn’t fair. Yes, Herman was a nuisance and wouldn’t leave her in peace. But he’d never yet made her snatch a hatpin out from among the artificial flowers where it lurked, and she didn’t think he ever would. There were nuisances, but then there were nuisances.

“Good morning, Flora,” he said, setting his homburg on the hat tree. “You look pretty today—you must have had a good night’s sleep.”

“Yes, thanks,” she answered shortly. She wasn’t going to tell him about little Yossel. She didn’t encourage him—but then, he needed no encouragement.

He’d got himself some tea and sat down at his desk when a Western Union messenger opened the door to the office. Flora thought about the messenger who’d brought word of little Yossel’s father’s death back to Sophie at the apartment the family shared. She shook her head, annoyed at herself. That wouldn’t happen here. People didn’t live here, however much it sometimes seemed they did.

She accepted the yellow envelope, gave the delivery boy a nickel, and watched him head back down to the street. “Who is it from?” Herman Bruck asked.

“It’s from Philadelphia,” she answered, and tore the envelope open. Her eyes slid rapidly over the words there. She had to read them twice before she believed them.
No one would bring bad news here
. The thought jeered in her mind. “It’s Congressman Zuckerman,” she said in a voice so empty, she hardly recognized it as her own. “He was walking downstairs with Congressman Potts from Brooklyn, and, and, he tripped and he fell and, he, he broke his neck. He died not quite three hours ago.”

She had never heard the Socialist Party office go so quiet, not even in the aftermath of the Remembrance Day riots. Myron Zuckerman had been a Socialist stalwart in Congress since before the turn of the century. Come November, his reelection would have been as automatic as the movement of a three-day clock. The Democrats wouldn’t have put up more than a token candidate against him, and the Republicans probably wouldn’t have run anyone at all. All of a sudden, though, everything was different.

“There’s no doubt?” Maria Tresca asked.

“Not unless the telegram is wrong,” Flora answered. Her voice was gentle; she knew Maria hadn’t been doubting so much as hoping. She looked down at the telegram. It blurred, not from changing words but from the tears that filled her eyes.

“That’s—terrible.” Herman Bruck’s voice was shaken, as if he was holding back tears himself. “He was like a father to all of us.”

“What are we going to do?” Three people spoke at the same time. Everyone in the office had to be thinking the same thing.

Maybe because Yossel Reisen’s death had got her used to thinking clearly through shocks, Flora answered before anyone else: “The governor will appoint somebody to fill out the rest of his term.” That brought dismayed exclamations from everyone; Governor MacFarlane was as thoroughgoing a Democrat as anyone this side of TR.

“Almost a year of being represented by someone who does not represent us,” Maria Tresca said bitterly. The syntax might have been imperfect, but the meaning was clear.

“It’s liable to be longer than that,” Flora said. “Whoever he is, he’ll have most of that time to establish himself, too. He may not be so easy to throw out when November comes, either.”

“We’ll have to pick the finest candidate we can to oppose him, whoever he turns out to be,” Herman Bruck said. He stood up and struck a pose, as if to leave no doubt where he thought the finest candidate could be found.

Flora studied him. He was bright. He was earnest. He would campaign hard. If he was elected, he would serve well enough. He was also bloody dull. If Governor MacFarlane named someone with spirit, the Socialists were liable to lose this district. That would be…
humiliating
was the word that came to Flora’s mind.

I’d make a better candidate than Herman Bruck,
she thought. At first, that was nothing but scorn. But the words seemed to echo in her mind. She looked at Bruck. She looked down at her own hands. Women could vote and hold office in New York State. She was over twenty-five. She could run for Congress—if the Socialists would nominate her.

She looked at Herman Bruck again. No one had shouted his name to the rafters, but there he stood, confident as if he were already the candidate. Of one thing she was certain: anyone so confident with so little reason could be overhauled. She didn’t know how it would happen, or even if she would be the one to do it, but it could be done. She was sure of that.

Arthur McGregor rode the farm wagon toward Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Days were almost as long as nights now, but snow still lingered. They could have more snow for another month, maybe six weeks—and for six weeks after the thaw finally began, the road to Rosenfeld would be hub-deep in mud.

Most years, McGregor cursed the spring thaw, which not only cut him off from the world but also made working the fields impossible or the next thing to it. Now he turned to Maude, who sat on the seat beside him, and said, “The road’ll make it hard for the Yanks to move.”

“That it will,” she agreed. “Weather’s never been easy here for anyone. I expect they’ve found that out for themselves by now.”

Alexander McGregor sat up in the back of the wagon. “You know what they say about our seasons, Pa,” he said, grinning. “We’ve only got two of ’em—August and winter.”

“When I first came to this part of the country, the way I heard it was July and winter,” McGregor said. “But it’s not far wrong, however you say it. And when the weather’s bad, they have the devil of a time getting from one place to another.”

“Except for the trains,” Alexander said, making no effort to conceal his anger at the railroads. “If it’s not a really dreadful blizzard, the trains get through.”

“I can’t say you’re wrong, son, because you’re right,” McGregor answered. The way he thought about trains was another measure of how the past year and a half had turned the world on its ear. Up till the day the war started, he’d blessed the railroads. They brought supplies into Rosenfeld in all but the worst of weather, as Alexander had said. They also carried his grain off to the east. Without them, he would have had no market for most of what he raised. Without them, the Canadian prairie could not have been settled, nor defended against the United States if somehow it was.

But now the USA held the tracks leading up toward Winnipeg, and used them to ship hordes of men and enormous amounts of matériel to the fighting front. In peace, he’d blessed the railroad and cursed the mud. In war, he did the exact opposite. He nodded to himself. Things were on their ear, all right.

Mary stuck her head up and looked around. With her eyes sparkling and her round cheeks all red with cold, she looked like a plump little chipmunk. “We ought to do something about the railroads,” she said in a voice that did not sound at all childlike. What she sounded like was a hard-headed saboteur thinking out loud about ways and means.

“You hush, Mary,” her mother said. “You’re not a soldier.”

“I wish I was,” Mary said fiercely.

“Hush is right,” Arthur McGregor said. He looked back over his shoulder at Alexander. So far as he knew, his son was keeping the promise he’d made and not trying to act the part of a
franc-tireur
. So far as he knew. Till the war, he hadn’t savored the full import of that phrase, either. It was what he didn’t know that worried him.

Half a mile outside of Rosenfeld, a squad of U.S. soldiers inspected the wagon. McGregor hated to admit it, but they did a good, professional job, one of them even getting down on his back on the dirt road to examine the axles and the underside of the frame. They were businesslike with him, reasonably polite to Maude, and smiled at his daughters, who were too young to be leered at. If they gave Alexander a sour look or two, those weren’t a patch on the glares he sent them. After a couple of minutes, they nodded and waved the wagon forward. Fortunately, Alexander didn’t curse them till it had gone far enough so they couldn’t hear him.

Julia gasped. Mary giggled. Arthur McGregor said, “Don’t use that sort of talk where your mother and sisters can hear you.” He glanced over to Maude. She was keeping her face stiff—so stiff, he suspected a smile under there.

Rosenfeld, as it had since it was occupied, seemed a town of American soldiers, with the Canadians to whom it rightfully belonged thrown in as an afterthought. Soldiers crowded round the cobbler’s shop, the tailor’s, the little café that had been struggling before the war started (what ruined most folks made a few rich), and the saloon that had never struggled a bit. There were three or four rooms up above the saloon that must have had U.S. soldiers going in and out of them every ten or fifteen minutes. McGregor had never walked up to one of those rooms—he was happy with the lady he’d married—but he knew about them. He glanced over to Maude again. She probably knew about those rooms, too. Husband and wife had never mentioned them to each other. He didn’t expect they ever would.

Henry Gibbon’s general store was full of U.S. soldiers, too, buying everything from five-for-a-penny jawbreakers to housewives with which to repair tattered uniforms in the field to a horn with a big red rubber squeeze-bulb. “You don’t mind my askin’,” Henry Gibbon said to the sergeant in green-gray who laid down a quarter for that item, “what the devil you going to do with that?”

“Next fellow in my squad I catch dozing when he ain’t supposed to,” the sergeant answered with an evil grin, “his hair’s gonna stand on end for the next three days.” A couple of privates who might have been in his squad sidled away from him.

A tiny smile made the corners of McGregor’s mouth quirk upward. Back in his Army days, he’d had a sergeant much like that. When they were just being themselves, the Yanks were ordinary people. When they were being occupiers, though…The smile disappeared. If they had their way, they’d do whatever they could to turn all the Canadians in the land they’d occupied into Americans. That was why Julia and Mary didn’t go to the school they’d reopened.

McGregor held onto Mary’s hand; Maude had charge of Julia. They picked their way toward the counter. Some of the U.S. soldiers politely stepped aside. Others pretended they weren’t there. That rude arrogance angered McGregor, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He held his face still. So did Maude. Their children weren’t so good at concealing what they felt. Once he had to give Mary’s hand a warning squeeze to get rid of the ferocious grimace she gave an American who’d walked through the space where she had been standing as if she didn’t exist.

“Good day to you, Arthur,” Henry Gibbon said. Had a moving picture wanted to cast somebody as a storekeeper, he would have been the man, if only his apron had been cleaner: he was tubby and bald, with a gray soup-strainer of a mustache that whuffed out when he talked. “Brought the whole kit and kaboodle with you, I see. Well, what can I do for you this mornin’?”