ago. But thank you. Thank you very much. It has passed over me.'
'What's that?' Featherston asked. The Jew only shrugged and changed the subject. Jake didn't push it. He had other things to worry about. The world wasn't his, as he thought it should be. But now, at least, he had the hope it was going his way.
W hen Jefferson Pinkard opened his pay envelope at the Sloss Works, he discovered it contained a pink slip along with his salary. His curses were soft and bitter and heartfelt. 'I should've stayed in Mexico, by God,' he said. 'If I'd known the company was going to treat me like a nigger, I would've.'
The paymaster, a gray-haired man named Harvey Gordon, had known Pinkard since before the Great War. He shook his head. 'You never should have gone to Mexico in the first place. You forfeited all the seniority you had. Now they're treating you like a new hire. I'm sorry as hell, Jeff, but them's the rules.'
'Fuck the rules,' Pinkard said. 'How am I gonna eat?'
Gordon didn't answer that. It wasn't a question that had an answer, except maybe, God knows. If God did know, He hadn't bothered telling Jefferson Davis Pinkard.
'Get moving,' the fellow in line behind him said. 'Don't hold up the works.'
'Fuck you, too,' Jeff answered, hoping for a fight. He didn't get one, only a stony glare. Muttering under his breath, he strode out of the steel mill. Won't be coming back, either, he thought. Ain't that a son of a bitch?
He wondered where he would live, too. A fired man had two weeks to leave company housing. If he didn't go after that, they'd pitch his belongings out of his cottage and onto the sidewalk.
At least the yellow clapboard house he had now was a long way from the one he'd shared with Emily back in happier times. How can I afford a new place if I just got fired?
It was a good question. Again, he wished he had a good answer for it. He wished he had any answer at all. Inside the cottage, he had a cheap iron bed and a cheap iron stove, an icebox, a rickety table, and one chair. A furnished room would have had more in it. He didn't want to think about a room. Thinking about one reminded him he didn't know what he'd do when they threw him out of here.
He made a mess of bacon and eggs for supper. He'd had them for breakfast, too. He was no kind of cook. He never had been. He did a tolerable job on bacon and eggs most of the time. He'd started getting sick of them. But he did so few things well, he didn't have much choice.
When he went to bed that night, he set the alarm clock, forgetting he wouldn't need to get up the next morning. The clock was cheap, too. Its tinny jangle jolted him awake. He was dressed and eating breakfast-bacon and eggs yet again-before he realized he had nowhere to go.
'Shit,' he said, without originality but with great feeling.
That morning was one of the strangest of his life. He sat on the one chair in the cottage and watched men streaming toward the Sloss Works, and others coming off the night shift. He could have been one of them. Up till the day before, he had been one of them. Now he felt as far apart from them as a prisoner of war did from his army. He didn't go to work there, not any more.
After a while, the two streams of men stopped. Everything grew quiet. Wives came out of the cottages to shop or gossip with the neighbors. Children headed for school. The ones too little to go to school played in front of their houses. All that had gone on for years while he worked at the steel mill, but he'd seen it only when he was too sick to go in. Now he felt fine (except for being sick of bacon and eggs), but he had nowhere to go.
He started to read a magazine, a pulp called Aeroplane Adventures. Some of the tales in it were set in the Great War, others afterwards. It was printed in Richmond; all the war stories had Confederate pilots gunning down Yankees, or Englishmen knocking German aeroplanes out of the sky. The later tales were set in the Confederate West or in odd corners of the world.
Aeroplane Adventures had sat on the kitchen table for more than a week without his looking at it. He'd been too tired to read when he came back from the Sloss Works. Now, with nothing else to do, he went through the magazine twice. A young Texan from a town called Cross Plains had written an exciting story about the air war over West Texas, where Jeff had served. The fellow had a few details wrong-he hadn't been old enough to see combat- but he could tell a tale. The other pieces were much less memorable.
Jeff started the magazine for a third time late that afternoon, but set it aside instead. He wished he had a wireless set, to make time pass more quickly. But then he brightened. 'Freedom Party meeting tonight!' he said: the first words he'd spoken since the morning. As he'd forgotten to leave the alarm alone, he'd almost forgotten the weekly meeting.
When the time came, he put on a white shirt and butternut trousers and hurried to the trolley stop where he could ride into central Birmingham. Crickets chirped. Lightning bugs winked on and off, on and off. The trolley stop was crowded. Several men had on the same kind of outfit as Jeff. 'Freedom!' one of them said.
'Freedom!' Jeff echoed. 'When was the last time you went to a Party meeting, Clem?'
'Been four-five years,' the other steelworker answered. 'I didn't reckon it was on the right track. Now I'm wondering if maybe I was wrong. Won't hurt none to come and find out.'
'You stopped coming to meetings for a while, too, Jeff,' another man said.
Pinkard shook his head. 'Not me. Not like you mean, anyhow. I never walked away from the Party. What I did was, I went down to the Empire of Mexico.'
'Oh,' said the fellow who'd brought it up. He said not another word after that. Anybody who'd fought in Mexico took the Freedom Party and its business very seriously indeed. The trolley rolled up then, clanging its bell. The men bound for the Freedom Party meeting climbed aboard with everyone else at the stop. Pinkard threw a dime in the fare box. He hadn't worried about money since coming back from Mexico, not while he'd had work. But now, without it, those ten cents suddenly seemed to loom as large as ten dollars would have.
And here was the old livery stable again, the smell of horses fainter than ever but still there. Here were the old folding chairs, even more battered than they had been before he'd headed south. Here was the rostrum at one end of the hall, and the Stars and Bars and Confederate battle flag on the wall behind it. The two flags hadn't changed; they still carried the stars representing Kentucky and Sequoyah, though the states lay under U.S. occupation.
The meeting was crowded. That steelworker wasn't the only man returning after a long absence. And there were faces Jeff had never seen before, some of them belonging to men surely too young to have fought in the Great War. Jeff recognized the way those men bore themselves: stiff with a special, nervous sort of dignity. He carried himself the same way. It was the distinctive posture of men who'd lost their jobs but didn't want the world to know.
Somebody swigged from a bottle of homebrew. Pinkard grinned to see that. Some things hadn't changed. Alabama remained dry. But the police had never come around trying to enforce the temperance laws at a Party meeting. They had to know they would have had a fight on their hands if they'd been so rash.
He found a chair and sat down. He'd sat right about here, he remembered, when he'd got up and pushed past Grady Calkins on his way out of one meeting. People had still sat on hay bales in those days, not folding chairs. He cursed under his breath. Calkins, a Freedom Party man, had done more to hurt the Party by turning assassin than all its enemies put together.
Caleb Briggs stepped up onto the rostrum and took his place behind the podium. The dentist looked out over the crowd and called, 'Freedom!'
'Freedom!' people shouted back.
Briggs cupped a hand behind one ear. 'I can't hear you.'
'Freedom!' This time, the yell shook the rafters.
'That's better.' Briggs nodded. 'Good to see some old familiar faces back with us again. Nice to know y'all have seen the light one more time. And you're welcome. We wish you'd've stayed with us all along, but it's good to have you back. And how many folks are here for the very first time?'
Several men raised their hands. Briggs nodded again. 'Good to see new blood, too. We need you. We need everybody. For years and years now, we've been telling anyone who'd listen that the Confederate States were going over a cliff. Not enough people did listen, and over we went, dammit. Now we've got to get back up again, and we need help. We've got to fight for what we believe in. You new men, are you ready to do that?'
'Yes, sir!' the newcomers chorused. Jeff wondered whether they knew Briggs meant it literally. If they didn't, they'd find out.
Sure enough, the dentist said, 'You'll have your chance, I promise you. We'll set this country to rights yet. Maybe people are starting to see what's wrong in Richmond. About time. And if we have to knock a few heads
