that. 'Even with one leg gone, he talks like a Democrat.' She inked a pen and slid a piece of paper in front of her so she could take notes. 'Now tell me about these strikes.'
'From what I've read, factory owners are trying to hold down wages by pitting workers against each other,' he said. 'With soldiers starting to come home from the war, they have more people wanting jobs than there are jobs to give, so they're seeing who will work for the lowest pay.'
'That sounds like capitalists,' Flora said with a frown. A moment later, she brightened. 'It also sounds like a political opportunity for us. If the factory owners keep doing things like that-and they probably will-they'll radicalize the workers, and they'll do a better job of it than we ever could.'
'I happen to know we've urged the strikers to stay as peaceful as they can, unless the bosses turn goons loose on them or their state governments or the U.S. government move troops against them,' Blackford said.
'Good.' Flora nodded. Blackford couldn't see that, either, but she didn't care. Something he'd said touched off another thought. 'Has Roosevelt made any statement about this yet?'
'One of the wire reports quotes him as calling the factory owners a pack of greedy fools,' the Congressman from Dakota said, 'but it doesn't say he'll do anything to make them stop playing games with people's lives '
'That sounds like him,' Flora said. 'He talks about a square deal for the workers, but he doesn't deliver. He delivered a war.'
'He delivered a victory,' Hosea Blackford corrected. 'The country was starved for one. The country's been starved for one for more than fifty years. You may not like that, but you can't stick your head in the sand and pretend it isn't so.'
'I don't intend to do any such thing,' Flora said sharply. 'The people were starved for a victory I've seen as much, even with my own brother. But after a while they'll discover they have the victory and they're still starved and still maimed and still orphaned. And they'll remember Teddy Roosevelt delivered that, too.'
Blackford's silence was thoughtful. After a few seconds, he said, 'You may very well be right.' He did his best to hold down the excitement in his voice, but she heard it. 'If you are right, that would give us a fighting chance in the elections of 1918, and maybe even in 1920. A lot of people now are afraid we'll be so badly swamped, the Democrats will have everything their own way everywhere.'
'A lot of things can happen between now and the Congressional elections,' she said. 'Even more things can happen between now and 1920.'
'That's true, too,' Blackford said. 'But you've seen how many Socialists are wearing long faces these days. Even Senator Debs is looking gloomy. Maybe they should cheer up.'
'Maybe. The real trouble'-Flora took a deep breath-'is that we've never won a presidential election. We've never had a majority in either house of Congress. Too many people, I think, don't really believe we ever can.'
'I've had doubts myself,' Blackford admitted. 'Being permanently in the minority is hard to stomach sometimes, if you know what I mean.'
'Oh, yes,' Flora said quietly. 'I'm Jewish, if you'll remember.' On the Lower East Side in New York City, Jews were a majority. Everywhere else in the country, everywhere else in the world… permanently in the minority was as polite a way to put it as she'd ever heard.
She wondered if reminding Blackford she was Jewish would make him decide he wasn't interested in her after all. She wondered if she wanted him to decide that. In many ways, her life would be simpler if he did. With a large family, though, she'd rarely known a simple life. Would she want it or know what to do with it if she had it?
The only thing Blackford said was, 'Of course I remember. It means I have to eat crab cakes and pork chops by myself.' His voice held nothing but a smile. 'Would you care to have dinner with me tonight? If you like, I won't eat anything that offends you.'
'I'm not offended if you eat things I can't,' Flora said, 'any more than an Irishman or an Italian would be offended if I ate corned beef on Friday. I'd be offended if you tried to get me to eat pork, but you'd never do anything like that.'
'I should hope not!' Blackford exclaimed. 'You still haven't said whether you'll have dinner with me, though.'
'I'd like to,' Flora said. 'Can we wait till after six, though? I've got a shirtwaist manufacturer coming in to see me at five, and I aim to give him a piece of my mind.'
'Six-thirty, say, would be fine. Shall I come to your office?'
'All right.' Flora smiled. 'I'm looking forward to it.' She hung up the telephone and went to work feeling better about the world than she had in some time.
Reginald Bartlett was discovering that he did not fit into the Richmond of late 1917 nearly so well as he had in 1914. Fighting on the Roanoke Valley front and in Sequoyah, getting captured twice and shot once (shot twice, too, actually: in the leg and the shoulder from the same machine-gun burst) by the Yankees, had left him a different man from the jaunty young fellow who'd gaily gone off to war.
Richmond was different, too. Then it had been bursting with July exuberance and confidence; now the chilly winds of October sliding into November fit the city's mood only too well. Defeat and autumn went together.
'Going to rain tomorrow, I reckon,' Reggie said to Bill Foster as the two druggist's assistants walked along Seventh Street together. He reached up with his right hand to touch his left shoulder. 'Says so right here.'
Foster nodded, which set his jowls wobbling. He was short and round and dark, where Bartlett was above average height, on the skinny side (and skinnier after his wound), and blond. He said, 'I heard enough people say that in the trenches, and they were right a lot of the time.' He'd spent his war in Kentucky and Tennessee, and come home without a scratch.
After touching his shoulder again, Reggie said, 'This isn't so much of a much.' He'd had a different opinion while the wound stayed hot and full of pus, but he'd been a long way from objective. 'Fellow I worked for before the war, man name of Milo Axelrod, he stopped a bullet with his face up in Maryland. He wasn't a bad boss-better than this McNally I'm working for now, anyhow.'
'From what you've said about McNally, that wouldn't be hard.' Foster might have gone on, but a small crowd had gathered at the corner of Seventh and Cary. He pointed. 'I wonder what's going on there.'
'Shall we find out?' Without waiting for an answer from his friend, Reggie hurried over toward the crowd. Shrugging, Foster followed. 'Oh, I see,' Bartlett said a moment later. 'It's a political rally. That figures, with the Congressional election next Tuesday. But what the devil is the Freedom Party? I've never heard of'em before.'
'I've seen a couple of their posters,' Bill Foster said. 'Don't rightly know what they stand for, though.'
'Let's get an earful. Maybe it'll be something good.' Reggie scowled as his wounded leg gave a twinge, which it hadn't done in a while. 'Couldn't be worse than the pap the Radical Liberals and the Whigs are handing out.'
'That's about right.' Foster nodded. 'Everybody who's in is making noise about how he never much cared for the war, and everybody who's out is saying that if he'd been in he never would've voted one thin dime for it.'
'And it's all a pack of lies, too,' Bartlett said with deep contempt. 'Why don't they admit they were all screaming their heads off for the war when it started? Do they think we've forgotten? And when Arango ran against Semmes for president two years ago, he said he'd do a better job of fighting the Yankees than the Whigs were. He didn't say anything about getting out of the war, not one word.'
The Freedom Party spokesman didn't have a fancy platform or a fancy suit, which proved he belonged to neither of the CSA's major parties. He stood in his shirtsleeves on a box or a barrel of some kind and harangued the couple of dozen people who were listening to him: '-traitors to their country,' he was shouting as Reggie and Bill Foster came up. 'Traitors and fools, that's what they are!'
'A crackpot,' Bartlett whispered. He folded his arms across his chest and got ready to listen. 'Let's hang around for a while. He may be funny.'
Somebody in the crowd already thought he was funny, calling, 'By what you're saying there, the whole government is nothing but traitors and fools. You've got to be a fool yourself, to believe that.'
'I do not!' the speaker said. He was an overweight, balding fellow of about fifty-five, whose fringe of gray hair blew wildly in the fall breeze. His name was Anthony Dresser-so said a little sign Reggie needed a while to notice. 'I do not. I tell you the plain, unvarnished truth, and nothing else but!'' His eyes, enormous behind thick spectacles, stared out at his small audience. 'And you, my friends, you hug the viper to your bosom and think it is your friend. Congress is full of traitors, the War Department is full of traitors, the administration-'
Reggie stopped paying much attention to him about then. 'And the moon is full of green cheese!' the heckler shouted, drawing a roar of laughter from the crowd.
Dresser sputtered and fumed, the thread of his speech, had it ever had one, now thoroughly lost. Reggie and
