me,' he muttered under his breath. The way things were these days, you couldn't even get good and drunk on two hundred dollars. Maybe it was just as well the saloons were all deceased.
A man in a pair of denim pants and a shirt with one sleeve pinned up came out of a secondhand clothing store. Pinkard stopped short. Plenty of men in Birmingham these days had an arm gone above the elbow. But, sure enough, it was Bedford Cunningham, Jeff's best friend once upon a time.
'How are you today, Jeff?' Cunningham asked. He was as tall as Pinkard, and had been as burly when they were both down on the floor at the Sloss Works. Since being wounded, he'd lost a lot of flesh.
'All right,' Pinkard answered shortly. He still remembered- he could never forget-what Bedford Cunningham and Emily had been doing when he'd walked into his cottage on leave. But if Bedford was here, he couldn't be back there doing anything with Emily now. That made Jeff somewhat better inclined toward him, enough so to ask, 'What you doin' now?'
'I was heading over toward Avondale Park,' Cunningham answered. 'This new Freedom Party is holding a rally. I want to see what they have to say.'
'Christ, Bedford, they're just politicians,' Jeff said, now certain he had the excuse he needed not to go along. 'You've heard one of 'em, you've heard 'em all. You've heard one of 'em, you've heard too many, too.'
'These boys are supposed to be different,' Bedford said. 'They're the ones who've been banging heads up in Richmond, if you've been reading the papers.' He essayed a small joke: 'They've been banging heads up in Richmond even if you haven't been reading the papers.'
As it happened, Jeff had been reading the papers, though not with so much attention as he might have. 'Forgot the name of that outfit,' he admitted. 'I didn't know they got down here to Birmingham, either.' He rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped; he needed a shave. 'What the hell? I'll come along with you.' Curiosity about the new party outweighed dislike and distrust for his old friend.
People-mostly working-class white men like Pinkard or his shabbier, out-of-work counterparts-straggled into the park and toward a wooden platform bedecked with Confederate flags. In front of the platform stood a row of hard-faced men in what might almost have been uniform: white shirts and butternut trousers.
'Don't reckon you want to pick a quarrel with those boys,' Bedford Cunningham said.
'You wouldn't want to do it more than once,' Jeff agreed. 'They've all been through the trenches, I'll lay- they've got that look to 'em.' Cunningham nodded.
On top of the platform prowled a thin man with lank brown hair. He kept looking out at the crowd, as if he wanted to launch into his speech but was making himself wait so more people could hear him. 'He's seen the elephant, too,' Bedford said. 'That's what my grandpappy would call it, anyway.'
'Yeah,' Pinkard said. 'Sure has.' Even this long after the war, he usually had little trouble telling a combat veteran from a man who wasn't.
At last, unable to contain himself any more, the skinny man strode to the front edge of the platform. 'Aren't you folks proud to be puttin' money in the damnyankees' pockets?' he called in a harsh but compelling voice. 'Aren't you glad to be workin' your fingers to the bone so they can put their mistresses in the fancy motorcars they build out of the steel you make? Aren't you glad the fools and the traitors in Richmond blow kisses to the damnyankees when they send 'em our steel and our oil and our money? They didn't make those things, so why the devil should they care?'
'He's got something,' Bedford Cunningham said.
Pinkard nodded, hardly noticing he was doing it. 'Yeah, he does.' He waved a hand. 'Now hush up, Bedford. I want to hear what he has to say for himself.'
'Do they remember, up there in Richmond, up there in the Capitol, up there in that whited sepulcher, do they remember we fought a war with the United States not so long ago?' the skinny man demanded. 'Do they? Doesn't look like it to me, friends. How does it look to you?'
'Hell, no!' Jeff heard himself shout. His was far from the only voice raised from the crowd. Beside him, Cunningham yelled louder than he did. He grinned at his old friend, the first time he'd done that since he'd caught him with Emily.
'Up there in Richmond, do they care if we're weak?' the skinny man asked, and answered his own question: 'No, they don't care. Why should they care? All they care about is getting elected. Nothing else matters to 'em. So what if the United States kick mud in our face? We were a great country once, before the traitors in Congress and the fools in the War Department stabbed us in the back. We can be great again, if we want to bad enough. Do they care, up there in Richmond? No, they don't care. Do you care, you people in Birmingham?'
He could give the same speech in Chattanooga and just drop in the different place-name and a couple of details. Jeff knew that. Somehow, it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. He felt the skinny man was speaking to him alone, showing him what was wrong, leading the way toward making it better. 'Yes!' he yelled at the top of his lungs, his voice one among hundreds, all crying the same word.
'I don't blame the United States for doing what they're doing to us,' the skinny man said. 'If I was in Teddy Roosevelt's shoes, I'd try and do the same thing. But I blame those people up in Richmond for letting him get away with it-no, by God, for helping him get away with it. We ought to throw every one of those bastards on the trash heap for that by itself Before we stand tall again, we have to throw 'em on the trash heap.
'But we've got more reasons than just that. They sat there sleeping while the niggers plotted and then rose up. And what did they do after that? They said, fine, from here on out niggers are just as good as white men. Tell me, friends, you reckon niggers are just as good as white men?'
'No!' roared the crowd, Jefferson Pinkard loud among them. Vespasian wasn't a bad fellow, and he did his job pretty well, but working alongside a white man didn't make him as good as a white man.
'Well, now, you see, you're smarter than they are up in Richmond,' the Freedom Party speaker said. 'Niggers aren't as good as white men, never were, never will be. Never can be, and the liars up in Richmond can't make 'em that way, even if they did give 'em the vote. The vote!' His voice rose to a furious, contemptuous howl. 'I've got a donkey back in Richmond. I can whip him from now till doomsday, and he won't ever win a horse race. You can say a nigger's as good as a white man, but that doesn't make it so. Never has. Never will. Can't.
'We've got to give those fools up in Richmond the heave-ho and elect some people who can stand up to the United States and stand up for the white man here. That's what the Freedom Party is all about. We've got Congressional elections coming up this fall. I hope you'll remember us. I'm Jake Featherston. I'll be by again if the money holds out. You'll have somebody on the ballot here who thinks the way I do. Get on over to your polling place and vote for him.' He waved to show he was done.
While the applause still thundered, a hat came through the crowd, as if to underscore that if the money holds out. Jeff pulled a hundred-dollar banknote out of his pocket and stuck it in the hat. He imagined doing such a thing back in 1914, or tried. He couldn't imagine having a hundred-dollar banknote in his pocket back then.
'There's a man who knows what we need,' Bedford Cunningham said as the rally began to break up.
'Sure as hell is. Sure as hell does,' Pinkard said. His voice was awed, almost as if he'd gone to church and been born again. He felt born again. Listening to Featherston made him believe the Confederate States could pull themselves together again. 'I'd follow him a long way.'
'Me, too,' Cunningham said. 'If whoever the Freedom Party runs is even a quarter as good on the stump as this Feathersmith-'
'Featherston,' Jeff corrected; he'd listened with great attention to every word the skinny man said. 'Jake Featherston.'
'Featherston,' Cunningham said. 'If I like who they're running here, I'll vote for him. I've been a Whig a long time, but I'd change.'
'So would I,' Jefferson Pinkard said. 'This Featherston, he knows what he's talking about. You can hear it in every word he says.'
VI
For perhaps the first time in his professional life, Colonel Irving Morrell wished he were back in Philadelphia. Fighting arguments about barrels by way of letters and telegrams from Leavenworth, Kansas, was not getting the job done in the way he would have hoped. Letters and wires were all too easy to ignore.
