Taking the trolley to the east side of town, just past the Sloss Works, made him mutter to himself. He hadn't gone that way very often since losing his job at the steel mill. Even the air here tasted different: full of sulfur and iron. The first good lungful made him cough. The second one made him smile. He'd lived with that taste, that smell, for most of his adult life. He hadn't even known he missed it till he found it again.
He wore a clean white shirt and butternut trousers, the not-quite-uniform of the Freedom Party. Most of the people on the trolley car were men about his age, and many of them had on the same kind of outfit he did. He didn't see anybody with a bludgeon. This wasn't supposed to be that kind of meeting. You could belong to the Tin Hats without being a Freedom Party man, and some people did.
When the trolley stopped at the Sloss Works, half a dozen more men got on. He recognized two or three of them. They nodded to one another. "Good to see you," one of them said. "How are you doing?"
"Not too bad, Tony," Pinkard answered. "No, not too bad. Party found me a job after I got canned, so I'm eating. And things look mighty good when the election rolls around."
"Sure do," Tony said. "About time, too."
The trolley stopped, brakes screeching. The motorman clanged his bell. "Avondale Park!" he said loudly. By the time men finished getting off the car, it was almost empty.
Under that warm, hopeful sun, Jeff walked toward the rostrum from which Amos Mizell would speak. Confederate flags and Tin Hat banners fluttered in the breeze. Here and there in the swelling crowd, men waved Freedom Party flags: the Confederate battle flag with colors reversed, red St. Andrew's cross on blue. Those, though, were unofficial.
Or were they? Up there on the rostrum, chatting with Mizell, stood Caleb Briggs, the head of the Freedom Party in Birmingham. The leader of the Tin Hats leaned closer to hear what Briggs had to say. Even nowadays, Briggs couldn't talk above a rasping whisper; the damnyankees had gassed him during the Great War.
Somebody yelled, "Freedom!" In an instant, the cry was deafening. Jefferson Pinkard shouted it out at the top of his lungs. The Freedom Party was the most important thing in his life these days. If it weren't for the Party, he hardly would have had a life.
Caleb Briggs grinned out at the crowd. His teeth were white and straight. A good thing, too-he was a dentist by trade. If he'd had a couple of missing choppers, he wouldn't have made much of an advertisement for his own work. He waved. The cries of, "Freedom!" redoubled.
Amos Mizell grinned and waved, too. A few people started singing "The Bonnie Blue Flag," the song the Tin Hats had taken for their own. Only a few, though-"The Bonnie Blue Flag" was hard to make out among the shouts of, "Freedom!" Mizell's grin slipped, although he kept waving. As at the rally, so across the CSA: these days, the Freedom Party spoke with a louder voice than the Tin Hats. That hadn't always been so. Had things gone a little differently, Mizell might have been standing in Jake Featherston's shoes. He had to be thinking about what might have been.
Then Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. In his ruined voice, he said, "This is a Tin Hats rally, boys, not one of ours," and he started singing "The Bonnie Blue Flag." That tipped the balance. Following his lead, the Freedom Party men in the crowd sang the Tin Hats' anthem. Amos Mizell tipped his hat to Briggs. He still didn't look perfectly happy, though. The men weren't singing "The Bonnie Blue Flag" because they'd thought of it themselves, but because a Freedom Party big wig had asked them to. That had to sting.
Jeff pushed and elbowed his way toward the front of the crowd, trying to get as close to the platform as he could. A lot of other determined men were doing the same thing. He didn't get quite so close as he would have liked. Still, he was taller than most, and he could see well enough.
When the loud chorus of "The Bonnie Blue Flag" ended, Caleb Briggs walked up to the microphone again. He raised both hands in the air, asking for quiet. Little by little, he got it. "Let's give a big hello to a man who's done a lot for the cause of freedom in the Confederate States," he said, and paused to draw in a wheezing breath. He sounded as if he'd smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. "Friends, here's Mr. Amos Mizell."
Mizell towered over Briggs. He held up both hands, too. He was missing his left little finger-one more man who'd spilled his blood for the Confederate States. The fat cats had got the CSA into the war, Pinkard thought, and then they'd sat back in Richmond, miles away from the trenches, and let other people do the fighting. Well, their time was coming. His smile had nothing to do with mirth. Yes, their time was coming fast.
"We've been through it," Mizell said. "We've all been through it, and we wonder why the devil we went. By the time we were done, the Confederate States were worse off than when we started, and that's not how things were supposed to work. We were patriots. They told us we were going to teach the damnyankees another lesson. And then what happened?
"I'll tell you what, my friends. They left us in the lurch. We had to stand up to gas before we could give it back. We had to face barrels before we had any barrels of our own. We were fighting the USA, but we had to fight our own civil war, too, on account of they were asleep at the switch and didn't know the niggers were going to rise up and kick us in the… the slats. I see some ladies here."
The veterans who made up most of the audience snickered. They knew what Mizell would have said if he were, say, sitting in a saloon with a whiskey in his hand. The few women surely knew, too, but he hadn't said it, so their honor was satisfied.
He went on, "And then, after we did everything we could do, we lost anyway. I don't reckon we would have if the niggers had stayed and done their work, but we did. And what about the folks who sent us out to die? They kept on getting rich. They let the money go down the drain, but you didn't see them missing any meals."
"That's right," Jeff growled, and his was far from the only angry, baying voice in the crowd. He turned to a man beside him and said, "We should have strung those bastards up a long time ago."
"Oh, hell, yes," the other man said, as if the idea that anyone could disagree was unimaginable. He slammed a hand against the side of his thigh. " Hell, yes."
Mizell was continuing, "-no chance the Whigs will fix their own house. They've been in power too long. All they know about is hanging on to what they've already got. And the Radical Liberals?" He made a scornful gesture. "Losers. They've always been losers. They'll never be anything but losers. No. If we're going to set our own house in order, what we need is…" His voice trailed away. He waited expectantly.
He didn't have to wait long. The cry of, "Freedom!" roared from almost every throat. After that first great yell, it settled down into a steady chant: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" Pinkard shouted it along with all the others, his fist pumping the air.
Amos Mizell raised his hands once more. Slowly, reluctantly, silence came. Mizell said, "That's right, friends. The Tin Hats know what this country needs. We need a new broom, a broom that will sweep all the old fools out of Richmond. We reckon the Freedom Party is the right one for the job. That's why I want all the Tin Hats in the country, regardless of whether they're registered in the Freedom Party or not, to vote for Jake Featherston. I tell you, we need to do everything we can to make that man president of the Confederate States of America. We'll throw everything we've got behind him, on account of he'll make this a country we can be proud to live in again."
He paused. "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" The chant rang out again. And then, a little at a time, another chant began to supplant it: "Feather ston! Feather ston! Feather ston!" The heavy, thudding stress on the last syllable was almost hypnotic.