'See you in the mornin', Mistuh Pinkard,' Vespasian said.
'Yeah,' Jeff answered. 'See you.' He didn't make his voice cold on purpose; it just came out that way. The more he went to Freedom Party meetings, the less he cared to work alongside a black man. Vespasian turned away and headed for the time clock to punch out without another word. Pinkard wasn't in the habit of bragging about going out on Freedom Party assault squadrons, but he wouldn't have been surprised had Vespasian known about it. Blacks had funny ways of finding out things like that.
Too damn bad, Jeff thought. Tired and sweaty, he headed toward the time clock himself.
Going into and out of the Sloss foundry, whites had always hung with whites and Negroes with Negroes. That hadn't changed. What had changed, lately, was how men from one group eyed those from the other. Blacks seemed warier than they had been during the war. Whites seemed less happy about having so many colored men around, doing jobs they wouldn't have been allowed to do before the war started. Pinkard understood that down to the ground. It was how he felt himself
He didn't stop sweating just because he'd stopped working for the day. Spring had come to Birmingham full of promises about what the summer would be like. If those promises weren't so many lies, summer would be hotter than hell, and twice as muggy. Summer in Birmingham was usually like that, so the promises probably held truth.
When he got close to home, Bedford Cunningham waved to him. Bedford was sitting on his own front porch, with a glass of something unlikely to be water on the rail in front of him. 'Come on over after supper, Jeff,' he called. 'We'll hoist a few.' He hoisted the one sitting on the rail.
'Can't tonight,' Pinkard answered. 'Got a meeting.'
'Man alive.' Cunningham shook his head, back and forth, back and forth. By the way he did it, that one on the rail wasn't the first he'd hoisted. 'Never reckoned you'd dive into the Freedom Party like a turtle diving off a rock into a creek.'
It was, when you got down to it, a pretty fair figure of speech. Jeff felt a lot happier swimming in the river of the Party than he did out on a rock by his lonesome. He said, 'Maybe you ought to come along, give yourself somethin' to do besides gettin' lit up.'
'I like getting lit up,' Cunningham said. 'What the hell better have I got to do, anyhow? Can't hardly work, not shy an arm. I'll vote Freedom, sure as hell I will, but I don't fancy sitting around and listening to people making speeches.'
'It's not like that,' Jeff protested, but Bedford Cunningham was hoisting his glass again. With a shrug, Pinkard went up the walk and into his own house.
'Hello, dear,' Emily said. She tilted up her face for a kiss. He gave her one, rather a perfunctory job. She didn't try to improve it. 'I know you got your meeting tonight,' she went on when he let her go, 'so supper'll be on the table for you in two shakes of a lamb's tail.' She went back into the kitchen to dish it out. She didn't shake her own tail, as she would have not so long before.
Jeff paid no attention to the change. 'Good thing you remembered,' he told her. 'Barney Stevens is back in town from Richmond, and he's going to let us know what those bastards in Congress are up to. I don't want to be late, not for that.'
'You won't be,' Emily promised, her voice floating out through the hall. 'Come on and set yourself down.'
He did, then shoveled chicken and dumplings into his face with the single-minded dedication a stoker might have shown in shoveling coal into a steam engine's firebox. Then, after bestowing another absentminded kiss on his wife, he headed over to the closest trolley stop for the ride to the livery stable where the Freedom Party still met.
He felt at home there, more even than he did in the cottage he'd shared with Emily since the days before the war. Almost all the men who'd joined the Party were veterans, as he was; they'd fought the damnyankees in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Arkansas, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. And most of them had put on white shirts and butternut pants these past few months and gone charging forth to break up rival parties' rallies and to remind the blacks of Birmingham where in the scheme of things they belonged.
'Freedom!' he said every time he shook somebody's hand or slapped somebody else on the back. And men also reached out to clasp his hand and slap his back and hailed him with the one-word greeting that was also a battle cry. He might have been a Freemason or an Odd Fellow: everyone in the livery stable with him was his brother.
Along with everyone else, he stamped and whistled and clapped when Barney Stevens, massive and impressive in a black suit, strode to the front of the open area. 'Freedom!' Stevens-now Congressman Stevens- called.
'Freedom!' his audience roared back. Jefferson Pinkard felt different when he used the slogan along with his comrades. It took on a power then that it lacked when it was simply a greeting. It became a promise, and at the same time a warning: anyone who didn't care for the Freedom Party's ideas needed to get out of the way, and in a hurry, too.
'Boys, we've got a power of work to do, and that's a fact,' Barney Stevens said. 'Nobody's mucked out that big barn they call the Capitol in a hell of a long time. Most of the folks, they've been there since dirt, or else their pappies were there since dirt, and they're taking over after the old man finally upped and dropped dead. Damn fancy-pants bluebloods.' Stevens fluttered his hand on a limp wrist. The Freedom Party men howled laughter. He went on, 'But we're starting to get things moving, to hell with me if we're not. This business with passbooks was just the first shell in the bombardment. Let me tell you some of what I mean…'
After a while, Jeff found himself yawning. Stevens wasn't a bad speaker-far from it. But Jeff hadn't joined the Freedom Party to pay close attention to the nuts and bolts of policy. He'd joined because he'd felt down in his bones that something had gone dreadfully wrong with his country and he thought Jake Featherston could fix it.
Exactly how it got fixed didn't matter so much to him as getting together every week with other people who followed Featherston and going out with them every so often to bust the heads of people who didn't. That brought back the sense of camaraderie he'd known in the trenches: about the only good thing he'd known in the war.
And so, when Barney Stevens went on and on about hearings and taxes and tariffs and labor legislation, Jeff slipped from the middle of the open area in the livery stable toward the back. 'Sorry, Grady,' he whispered after stepping on another man's toes. He noticed he wasn't the only fellow moving toward the back of the stable, either. Everybody was glad to have Stevens in Congress, but he'd lost part of his audience tonight. He'd been elected to take care of the details, not to bore everybody with them.
Pinkard wasn't the first one to slide out the door. 'My wife's a bit poorly,' he whispered to the two burly guards as he left. They nodded. Odds were, they knew he was lying. He shrugged. He'd been polite-and he'd thrown half a million dollars into the big bowl by the door. As long as he was both polite and paid up, the guards didn't care if he left early.
Since he was leaving early, Emily would probably still be awake. Maybe they'd make the mattress creak when he got home. For some reason, she'd acted kind of standoffish toward him lately. He'd take care of that, by God. Horning it out of her was the best way he knew-he'd enjoy it, too.
He took the trolley to the edge of Sloss company housing, then walked to his cottage. A few people still sat on their front porches, enjoying the fine night air. He wondered if he'd see Bedford Cunningham on his, drunk or passed out. But Bedford must have gone inside to bed, because he wasn't there.
Pinkard's own house was also dark, so he figured Emily had gone to bed, too. Well, if she had, he'd damn well wake her up. He turned his key in the lock. The door didn't squeak as it swung on its hinges. He'd oiled them after he came home from the war, and quietly kept them oiled ever since. He'd caught Emily cheating on him once, and wanted a fair chance to do it again if she stepped out of line. She hadn't, not that he knew of, but…
The hinges didn't squeak, but something in the house was squeaking, squeaking rhythmically. He knew what that noise was. It came from the bedroom. Rage filled him, the same rage he knew when he put on white and butternut and went off to break heads, but focused now, as if with a burning glass.
'God damn you, Emily, you little whore!' he bellowed, and stomped down the hall toward the bedroom.
Twin cries of horror greeted him, one Emily's, the other a man's. They were closely followed by scrabbling noises, a thump, and the sound of running feet. Whoever'd been in there with Emily hadn't wanted to face Jeff. As Jeff stormed in, his feet caught on something, then kicked something else: a man's tangled trousers and his shoe. Whoever the fellow was, he'd departed too quickly to bother retrieving his clothes.
'Jeff, honey, listen to me-' Emily spoke in a quick, high, desperate voice.
