states.'
David didn't reply with words, not right away. Instead, he rapped his artificial leg with his knuckles. By the sound that came from it, he might almost have been knocking on a door; it was made of wood and canvas and leather and metal. 'You know how many men like me there are in the USA-men without legs, men without arms, men without eyes, men without faces? If we don't keep what we won, why did we get shot and blown up and gassed? Answer me that one, and then I'll say good-bye to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah.'
'There is no answer,' Flora said. 'Sometimes something looks like a good idea when you do it but turns out not to be later on. Or haven't you ever had that happen?'
'Oh, yes. I've seen that. Who hasn't? But this one is kind of large to treat that way. And what do we do if giving back those states turns out to be that same kind of mistake? Taking them again would get expensive.'
'I don't know,' Flora said.
'Well, that's honest, anyhow. I said you were,' her brother replied. 'Does Al Smith know? Does anybody in the whole wide world know?'
'How can anybody know?' Flora asked, as reasonably as she could. 'We'll just have to see how things turn out, that's all.'
David paused to light a cigarette. He blew smoke up toward the ceiling, then said, 'Seems to me that's a better reason for not doing something than for doing it. But I'm no politician, so what do I know?'
'It's going to happen.' Flora knew she sounded uncomfortable. She couldn't help it. She went on, 'If it makes you that unhappy, the thing to do is to vote for Taft. I think it will work out all right. I hope it does.'
'I hope it does, too. But I don't think so. The Confederates on the banks of the Ohio again?' David Hamburger shook his head. 'We had to worry about that for years, and then we didn't, and now we will again.'
'When they were on the Ohio, they didn't cross it in the last war,' Flora said.
'They didn't have barrels then. They didn't have bombers then, either,' her brother said.
'Even if they do get it back, they've promised to leave it demilitarized afterwards,' Flora said.
'Oh, yes. They've promised.' David nodded. 'So tell me-how far do you trust Jake Featherston's promises?'
Flora wished he hadn't asked that. She'd deplored Featherston in the U.S. Congress long before he was elected. She liked him no better, trusted him no further, now that he was president of the CSA. As she had on the stump, she said, 'He's there. We have to deal with him.' Her brother let the words fall flat, which left them sounding much worse than if he'd tried to answer them.
Chester Martin faced Election Day with all the enthusiasm of a man going to a doctor to have a painful boil lanced. His efforts to build a construction workers' union in antilabor Los Angeles had got strong backing from the Socialist Party. How could he forget that? He couldn't. But he couldn't make himself like the upcoming plebiscite, either.
His wife had no doubts. 'I don't want another war,' Rita said. 'I lost my first husband in the last one.' She hardly ever spoke of him, but now she went on, 'Why should anybody else have to go through what I did? If we don't have to fight, that's good news to me.'
But Chester answered, 'Who says we won't?'
'Al Smith does, that's who.' Rita sent him an exasperated stare. 'Or are you going to vote for a Democrat for president again? Look how well that turned out the last time.'
'I don't know. I'm thinking about it,' Chester said. Rita looked even more exasperated. She'd always been a Socialist. He'd been a Democrat through the Great War, but the only time he'd voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1932, when he'd chosen Calvin Coolidge over Hosea Blackford. Blackford had had three and a half years to end the business collapse, and hadn't done it. Coolidge, of course, dropped dead three weeks before taking office, and Herbert Hoover, his running mate, hadn't done it, either. For that matter, neither had Smith. Chester went on, 'Giving back so much of what we fought for sticks in my craw.'
'Giving the country back to the Democrats sticks in my craw,' Rita said. 'Do you think Taft cares about what you're trying to do here? If you do, you're nuts. His father didn't stand with the producers, and neither does he.'
That had an unpleasant ring of truth. Plenty of people would think local issues were the most important ones in the election. Half the time, Chester did. But, the other half of the time, he didn't. He said, 'If the Confederates want Houston and Kentucky back and then they're done, that's one thing.'
'They say that's all,' Rita reminded him.
He nodded. 'I know what they say. But Jake Featherston says all sorts of things. If he gets them back and starts putting soldiers into them, that's a different story. If he does that, we've got trouble on our hands.'
'Even if he does, we can beat the Confederates again if we have to,' Rita said. 'If we tell them to pull back, they'd have to back down, wouldn't they?'
'Who knows? The point is, we shouldn't have to find out.' Chester muttered unhappily to himself. He wanted a party with a strong foreign policy, and he also wanted a party with a strong domestic policy. Trouble was, the Democrats offered the one and the Socialists the other. He couldn't have both. 'Maybe I ought to vote for the Republicans. Then I'd have the worst of both worlds.'
'Funny. Funny like a crutch,' his wife said. 'Well, I can't tell you what to do, but I know what I'm going to.'
Chester didn't. He went through October and into November unsure and unhappy. Autumn in Los Angeles was nothing like what it had been in Toledo. It was the one season of the year where he might have preferred his old home town. Trees didn't blaze with color here. Most of them didn't even lose their leaves. The air didn't turn crisp and clean, either. It rained once, toward the end of October. That was the only real way to tell summer was gone for good. The Sunday before the election, it was back up to eighty-one. That wouldn't have happened in Toledo, but there was nothing wrong with sixty-one, either. Forty-one and twenty-one were different, to say nothing of one. Los Angeles might see forty-one as a low. Twenty-one? One? Never.
Picketing was a lot easier when you weren't freezing while you carried a sign. Chester and his fellow construction workers kept on getting help from the local Socialist Party. He did grumble about the plebiscite with Party men, but never very loudly. Like most people, he was shy about biting the hand that fed him. The Socialists probably wouldn't have dropped support for his young, struggling union if they knew he might vote for Taft, but why take chances?
Houses and apartment buildings and factories and shops went up all over Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs, but not many went up without pickets around the construction sites. The Los Angeles Times kept screaming that the pickets were nothing but a bunch of dirty Reds who ought to be burned alive because hanging was too good for them. But the Times screamed that about everything it didn't like, and it didn't like much. Strikers and cops began to learn to get along, if not to love one another. Even the insults and cries of, 'Scab!' as men crossed the picket line came to have a certain ritualistic quality to them.
November 5 dawned bright and clear, though the day plainly wouldn't reach the eighties. 'What are you going to do?' Rita asked at breakfast.
'Vote.' Martin reached for the pepper shaker and spread pungent black flakes over his fried eggs.
Rita made an irritated noise. 'How?'
'Oh, about like this.' He mimed picking up a stamp and making an X on a ballot with it.
'Thank you so much.' Somehow, no sarcasm flayed like a spouse's. His wife asked a question he couldn't evade: 'Who are you going to vote for?'
'To tell you the truth, honey, I won't know till I get inside the voting booth,' Chester answered.
'If you don't vote for Al Smith, you'll end up sorry,' Rita said. 'You were when you didn't vote for Blackford eight years ago.'
'I know I was. I think Coolidge might have been better than Hoover, but we'll never know about that, will we?' He spread butter and grape jam on a piece of toast, then started to throw out the empty jam jar.
'Don't do that,' Rita said. 'I'll wash it out and use it for a glass. Jelly glasses are better for Carl-they don't hold as much as real ones, and they're thick, so they don't break as easy if he drops them.'
'All right,' Martin said with his mouth full. He put the jam jar back on the table. When he finished the toast, he gave Rita a quick, greasy kiss, stuck a cloth cap on his head, and hurried out the door. Rita took a deep breath, as if to call something after him, but she didn't. She must have realized it wouldn't change his mind.
