Foster grinned at each other, enjoying his discomfiture. The speech surely would have been boring. This was anything but. 'Not as easy to get up on the stump as the old boy thought, is it?' Foster said with a chuckle.
'You are all traitors to your country, for not listening to the plain and simple truth!' Dresser shouted furiously.
'And you're a maniac, and they ought to lock you up in the asylum and lose the key!' It wasn't the first heckler, but another man.
Dresser looked to be on the point of having a fit. Somebody reached up and tugged at his trousers. He leaned over, cupping a hand behind his ear. Then, with a fine scornful snort, he jumped down from his perch. 'All right,' he said. 'All right! You show them then, if you think you know so much. I can tell you what you will show them-you will show them you do not have any notion of what to say or how to say it.'
Up onto the platform scrambled a lean man somewhere in his thirties, in a day laborer's collarless cotton shirt and a pair of uniform pants. He looked around for a moment, then said, 'Tony's right. A blind man should be able to see it, too. The government is full of traitors and fools.'
Dresser had been argumentative, querulous. The newcomer spoke with absolute conviction, so much so that before he caught himself Reginald Bartlett looked north toward Capitol Square, as if to spy the traitors in the act.
'Yeah? You can't prove it, either, any more than the other jerk could,' a heckler yelled.
'You want proof? I'll give you proof, by Jesus,' the lean man said. He didn't talk as if he had any great education, but he didn't seem to feel the lack, as did so many self-made men. 'Look what happened when the Red niggers rose up, back at the end of' 15. They damn near overran the whole country. Now, why is that, do you reckon? It's on account of nobody in the whole stinking government had the least notion they were plotting behind our backs. If that doesn't make everybody from the president on down a damn fool, you tell me what in the hell it does do.'
'He's got something, by God,' Foster said, staring at the new speaker.
'He's got a lot of nerve, anyhow,' Reggie said.
'That's why you ought to vote for Tony Dresser for Congress,' the lean man continued: 'on account of he can see the plain truth and you can't. Now the next thing you're going to say is, well, they're a pack of fools up there, all right, with their fancy motorcars and their whores, but they can't be traitors because they fought as long as they could and the Yankees are pretty damn tough.
'Well, this here is what I've got to say about that.' The lean man let loose with a rich, ripe raspberry. 'I know for a fact that people tried to warn the government the niggers were going to rise, on account of I was one of those people. Did anybody listen? Hell, no!' Contempt dripped from his voice like water from a leaky roof. 'Some of those niggers were servants to rich men's sons, important men's sons. And the rich men in the Capitol and the important men in the War Department shoveled everything under the rug. If that doesn't make 'em traitors, what the devil does?'
'He has got something,' Bill Foster said in an awed voice.
'He's got a big mouth,' Bartlett said. 'You throw charges like that around, you'd better be able to name names.'
Instead of naming names, the newcomer on the stump charged ahead: 'And after that-after that, mind you, after the niggers rose up-what did the government go and do? Come on. You remember. You're white men. You're smart men. What did they go and do?' The lean man's voice sank to a dramatic whisper: 'They went and put rifles in those same niggers 'hands, that's what they did!' He whispered no more, but shouted furiously: 'If that doesn't make 'em traitors, what the devil does?'
Reggie remembered Rehoboam, the Negro prisoner of war who'd shared his U.S. hospital ward after losing a foot in Arkansas-and after being a Red rebel in Mississippi. Things weren't so straightforward as this new Freedom Party speaker made them out to be. The older Reggie got, the more complicated the world looked. The lean man was older than he, but still saw things in harsh shades of black and white.
And he contrived to make his audience see them the same way. 'You want to put Tony Dresser into Congress to give the real people of the Confederate States a voice,' he shouted, 'the working men, the men who get their hands dirty, the men who went out and fought the war the fools and the traitors and the nigger-lovers got us into. Oh, you can throw your vote away for somebody with a diamond on his pinky'-with alarming effectiveness, he mimed a capitalist-'but who's the fool if you do?'
'Why the hell ain't you runnin' for Congress instead of that long-winded son of a bitch?' somebody shouted.
'Tony's the chairman of the Freedom Party,' the lean man answered easily. 'You promote the commander of the unit, not a new recruit.' He took out his billfold and displayed something Bartlett could not make out. 'Here's my membership card- number seven, from back in September.'
'Where do we sign up?' Two men asked the question at the same time. One of them added, 'You ain't gonna stay a new recruit long, pal, not the way you talk. Who the hell are you, anyway?'
'My name's Featherston-Jake Featherston,' the lean man answered. 'Sergeant, Confederate States Artillery, retired.' He scowled. 'The fools in the War Department retired damn near the whole Army.' With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, he made himself smile. 'Party office is a couple blocks down Seventh, toward the Tredegar works. Come on by. Hope you do, anyways.'
'Damned if I'm not tempted to,' Bill Foster said as the little rally began to break up. 'Damned if I'm not. That fellow Featherston, he's got a good way of looking at things.'
'He's got a good line, that's for certain,' Reggie Bartlett said. 'If he were selling can openers door to door, there wouldn't be a closed can in Richmond this time tomorrow. But just because something sounds good doesn't make it so. Come on, Bill. Do you think a stage magician really pulls a Stonewall out of your nose?'
'Wish somebody'd pull one out of somewhere,' Foster answered.
Reggie's laugh was rueful, five-dollar goldpieces being in notably short supply in his pockets, too. He said, 'The world's not as simple as he makes it out to be.'
'Well, what if it isn't?' his friend returned. 'I wish it was that simple. Don't reckon I'm the only one who does, either.'
'Reckon you're not,' Bartlett agreed. 'But most folks are the same as you and me: they know the difference between what they wish and what's really out there.'
'Yeah?' Foster raised an eyebrow. 'How come we just fought this damn war, then?' Reggie thought about that for a while, but found no good answer.
Guided by a pilot intimately familiar with the local minefields, the USS Dakota made a slow, cautious entrance into New York harbor. Sailors on tugs and freighters waved their caps at the battleship. Steam whistles bellowed and hooted. Fireboats shot streams of water high into the air.
Sam Carsten stood by the port rail, enjoying the show. The late-November day was bleak and gloomy and cold, but that didn't bother the petty officer at all. Anything more clement than clouds and gloom bothered him: he was so blond and pink, he sunburned in less time than he needed to blink. After Brazil entered the war on the side of the USA and Germany and their allies, the Dakota had gone up into the tropical Atlantic after convoys bound for Britain from Argentina. He was only now recovering from what the cruel sun had done to him.
Off to the west, on Bedloe Island, stood the great statue of Remembrance, the sword of vengeance gleaming in her hand. Carsten turned to his bunkmate and said, 'Seeing her gives you a whole different feeling now that we've gone and won the war.'
'Sure as hell does.' Vic Crosetti nodded vigorously. He was as small and swarthy as Carsten was tall and fair. 'Every time I seen that statue before, it was like she was saying, 'What the hell you gapin' at me for? Get out there and kick the damn Rebs in the belly.' Now we gone and done it. Can't you see the smile on that bronze broad's kisser?'
Remembrance looked as cold and stern and forbidding as she had since she'd gone up not long after the Second Mexican War. Even so, Carsten said, 'Yeah.' He and Crosetti grinned at each other. Victory tasted sweet.
'Carsten!' somebody said behind him.
He turned and stiffened to attention. 'Sir!'
'As you were,' Commander Grady said, and Sam eased out of his brace. The commander of the Dakota's starboard secondary armament was a pretty good fellow; Sam cranked shells into the forwardmost five-inch gun
