He built up the fire in the stove and got a pot of coffee going. Then he went back to the bathroom and dry- swallowed a couple of aspirins. He lathered his face and shaved. As he was toweling himself dry afterwards, he wondered why he hadn't cut his own throat. It wasn't the first time that question had occurred to him.
After a cup of strong black coffee, after the aspirins started to work, the world looked a little less gloomy. He ate a big chunk of bread and ham and cut off a piece of last night's partly cremated ham steak to toss into his dinner pail. Since he'd thrown Emily out, he'd discovered just what a lousy cook he was. 'Ain't starved yet,' he declared, and headed out the door. The place was an unholy mess, but he lacked the time, the energy, and the skill to do anything about it.
He had to walk past Bedford Cunningham's cottage on the way to the foundry. He looked straight ahead. He didn't want to see Bedford, even if he was there. He didn't want to see Fanny Cunningham, either. He blamed her, too. If she'd kept her husband happy in bed, he wouldn't have had to go sniffing around Emily.
More steelworkers, white and black, crowded the path leading to the Sloss Works. Greetings filled the air: 'Hey, Lefty!' 'Mornin', Jeff.' 'How you is, Nero?' 'What's up, Jack?' 'Freedom!' Pinkard heard that a couple-three times before he got to the time clock and stuck in his card to start the day. As the aspirins and coffee had done, the slogan made him feel better.
He winced only a little when he stepped out onto the foundry floor. Once he was out there, he knew he'd make it through the day. If he could stand the clangor now, he wouldn't even notice it by the time afternoon rolled around.
Vespasian came onto the floor only a minute or so after he did. 'Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard,' the Negro steelworker said.
'Morning,' Pinkard answered. Every time he thought about it these days, the idea of working with a black buck graveled him more. But Vespasian had been out on the foundry floor since 1915, and he wasn't even slightly uppity. He gave Jeff's anger no place to perch. That in itself was infuriating.
They had no time for light conversation, not this morning. The big crucible swung down and poured a fiery load of molten metal down onto the sand of the foundry floor. Steam rose in hissing, stinking clouds. The steel seemed as determined to get free of the mold as any house cat was to get outdoors.
Whatever else Pinkard thought of Vespasian, he had to allow that the big Negro knew his way around steel. Vespasian made as good a partner as Bedford Cunningham ever had, and he wasn't likely to try and sleep with Emily.
Or maybe he is, Jeff thought. Who the hell knows? Emily's liable to be taking on niggers these days. He didn't know what the woman he'd married, the woman he'd loved, was doing these days, not for certain. He'd finally let her back into the house so she could put on some clothes and gather up whatever she could carry in her arms. Then he'd thrown her out again. She hadn't come round the place since. He wouldn't have let her in if she had.
Maybe she was working in a factory somewhere downtown. Maybe she was standing on a streetcorner, shaking her ass whenever a man walked by and hoping he'd give her five or six million dollars for a fast roll in the hay.
'I don't care what she's doing,' Pinkard said, quickly, fiercely. Vespasian shouldn't have been able to hear that low-voiced mumble. But the Negro had been on the foundry floor a long time. He'd got as good as anybody could get at hearing under the racket and picking up talk. He knew about Emily. Everybody at the Sloss Works knew about Emily, sure as hell. Just for a second, he looked at Pinkard with pity in his eye.
Jeff glared back, and Vespasian flinched as if from a blow. The last thing in the world Jeff wanted was a black man's pity. 'Work, God damn you,' he snarled. Vespasian did work, his face as blank of expression now as a just- erased blackboard.
Before Pinkard had been conscripted, he wouldn't have talked to Vespasian that way. He'd thought the Negro a pretty good fellow then. He might not have talked to Vespasian that way before he first heard Jake Featherston speak. He might as well have been blind before. But Featherston had opened his eyes, all right.
'Joining the Freedom Party was the best thing I ever did,' he said. If Vespasian heard that, he pretended he didn't.
It was true, though. The Freedom Party gave him a family, a place to go, things to do. If he hadn't been active in the Party, he might have gone clean round the bend when Emily took off her dress for Bedford Cunningham that second time. That Emily might not have done any such thing if he hadn't so immersed himself in the Freedom Party never once entered his mind.
What he did think about was that several of his Party buddies had had their marriages go to hell and gone in the past few months. None of the other blowups had been quite so spectacular as his, but having pals who understood what he was going through because they were going through the same thing made life easier. None of his friends had been able to figure out why they and their wives had broken up. Trying gave them something to talk about at Party meetings and when they got together betweentimes.
The only place where he didn't think that much about the Freedom Party was out on the foundry floor. If you thought about anything but what you were doing out there, you were asking for a trip to the hospital if you were lucky and a trip to the graveyard if you weren't. He'd learned that early on, and re-learned it when he came back to the Sloss Works after the war. Work came first. That was a matter of life and death.
At last, work ended for the day. As the screech of the steam whistle faded, Pinkard turned to Vespasian and said, 'See you tomorrow. Freedom!'
Vespasian's lips had started to shape the word see. But he didn't say anything at all. He showed expression now: the expression was pain. Jeff had seen it on Yankees' faces as he drove home the bayonet. Vespasian turned away from him and stumbled off to clock out as if he too had taken a couple of feet of sharpened steel in the guts. He might have had a pretty good notion of Jeff's politics beforehand, but now he was left in no possible doubt. Jeff laughed out loud. The future was on his side. He felt it in his bones.
He clocked out and hurried home to his cottage. Fanny Cunningham sat out on the front porch of hers next door. Jeff leered at her, wondering if this was how Bedford had looked at Emily. It didn't draw Fanny into his arms. She fled back into the house. He laughed again. His hot, burning laughter filled the street, as molten steel filled its mold.
He took some sausages out of the icebox and burned them for supper. His suppers, these days, were of two sorts: burnt and raw. He ate bread with them, and gulped down a glass of homebrew that was no better than it had to be. The dishes sat in the sink, waiting. As far as he was concerned, they could go right on waiting, too. He had a Freedom Party meeting tonight. That was a hell of a lot more important than a pile of goddamn dishes.
'Freedom!' The greeting filled the livery stable. It wasn't a challenge here, nor a shout of defiance: it was what one friend said to another. The men who filled the stable-filled it almost to overflowing; before long, like it or not, the Birmingham chapter would have to find a new place to meet-were friends, colleagues, comrades. Those who'd been in the Party longer got a little more respect than johnny-come-latelys, but only a little. Jeff had joined long enough ago to deserve some of that respect himself
With Barney Stevens up in Richmond, a skinny little dentist named Caleb Briggs led the meetings and led the Party in Birmingham. 'Freedom!' he shouted, his voice thin and rasping- he'd been gassed up in Virginia, and wouldn't sound right till they laid him in his grave.
'Freedom!' Pinkard shouted with the rest of the men who'd come together to find, to build, something larger and grander than themselves.
'Boys, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that Jake Featherston's going to be running for president this year.' Briggs paused to suck more air into his ruined lungs-and to let the Party members cheer till they sounded almost as hoarse as he always did. Then he went on, 'We've done a little bit of brawling every now and again, but it's not a patch on what we're going to be doing, let me tell you that!'
More cheers erupted. Jeff pumped his fist in the air. Brambles and thorns in his throat, Briggs went on, 'The Whigs will be holding rallies here in town. The goddamn Radical Liberals will be holding rallies here in town.' He shook his head. Lamplight reflected wetly from his eyes. 'That's not right. Those traitor bastards will try and hold rallies here in town. Are we going to let 'em?'
'No!' Jeff shouted, along with most of the Freedom Party men. The rest were shouting 'Hell, no!' and other, coarser, variations on the theme instead.
'That's right.' Caleb Briggs nodded now, which made his eyeballs glitter in a different way. Jeff could not have said how it was different, but it was. Briggs went on, 'That's just right, boys. This is a war we're in, same as the one we fought in the trenches. We would have won that one, only we got stabbed in the back. This time, we hit the
