"Feather ston! Feather ston! Feather ston!" Jefferson Pinkard shouted it, too. He'd been a Freedom Party man ever since the first time he heard Jake Featherston speak, not long after the war ended. He'd come this far with Jake; he wanted to go further. And now it looked as if he could, as if the whole CSA could.
As he looked around the crowd, he saw knots of men in white and butternut from whom the chant of, "Feather ston!" came loudest. He smiled to himself. No, Caleb Briggs didn't miss a trick. He must have given some of the boys special instructions. The only thing that surprised Pinkard was that the local Party boss hadn't recruited him to help change the chant. He shrugged. Briggs did as Briggs pleased.
"Feather ston! Feather ston!" Mizell seemed startled to hear the Freedom Party leader's name. The cry of, "Freedom!" he'd undoubtedly expected. This? No.
Well, too bad, Jeff thought. You back the Freedom Party, you've got to back Jake Featherston, too. No way around that, even if you wish there were.
By his manner up there on the rostrum, maybe the head of the Tin Hats wished exactly that. No matter how he wished things had turned out, his outfit was in second place, not first. Hearing Jake's name roared in his face at his own rally had to show him he would never run first.
Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. It helped his harsh near-whisper carry: "We're all in this together, friends: Freedom Party, Tin Hats, the Redemption League out West, all the people who see what's wrong and who've got what it takes to stand up and fix it. When Jake Featherston wins this fall, we all win-every single one of us, and every single group. That's what we've got to take away from this rally today. Just like we were in the trenches, we're all in this together. Only difference is, this time, by God, we're going to win!"
No chant rose this time, just a great roar of agreement. Jeff pumped his fist in the air again, and his was far from the only one raised high. Up on the rostrum, Briggs put a hand on Amos Mizell's shoulder. He was smaller than the man who led the Tin Hats, but still somehow had the air of a father consoling a son.
After a moment, Mizell straightened-almost to attention, as if he were back in the Army again. He went to the microphone and said, "Dr. Briggs is right. When Jake Featherston's president, we all win. And we will win come November!"
He got his own round of applause then. Somebody in the crowd started singing "Dixie." Maybe it was one of the men with instructions from Briggs, maybe someone who'd had a good idea on his own. Either way, in the blink of an eye everyone sang it. Along with the rest of the men and women in Avondale Park, Pinkard bawled out the words. Tears stung his eyes. This was what mattered, this feeling of being part of something bigger, more important, than himself.
When the last raucous chorus ended, Briggs went over to the microphone. "Remember this, folks," he said. "Remember it good. What we've got here today, the whole country gets when we win."
Only a smattering of applause answered him. No more than a handful of people understood what he was talking about. But Jefferson Pinkard was one of those few. He beat his palms together till they were red and sore. That was what he wanted-the whole country like a Freedom Party rally. What could be better? Nothing he could think of.
The way things looked, the whole country wouldn't be able to think of anything better, either. That seemed very fine indeed to Jeff.
S omething tickled Anne Colleton's memory when she checked into the Excelsior Hotel in Charleston. It tickled harder when she got into her room. The tickling wasn't of the pleasant sort. After she looked around the room, she realized why. Roger Kimball had tried to rape her here, almost ten years ago now. She'd given him a knee between his legs, aimed a pistol at him, and sent him on his way. In short order, he was dead, shot by that woman from Boston.
Anne sighed. Kimball had been loyal to Jake Featherston come hell or high water. Anne was loyal to nobody but herself, not like that. She'd thought Featherston was a loser, and she'd broken her ties to the Freedom Party. That was the biggest reason she and Roger had broken up, the biggest reason she hadn't given herself to him, the biggest reason he'd tried to take her by force.
And now here she was, back in Charleston, back in the Freedom Party. She tasted the irony there. Had Roger been right all along? Anne shook her head. She didn't care to admit that, even to herself. After she'd walked away from Featherston, the country had changed. That was what had brought her back.
Still, she granted herself the luxury of another sigh. It was too bad. She'd never found anybody who could match Roger Kimball in bed.
A glance in the mirror on the dresser told her she probably never would. A good start on a double chin, lines on her face no powder could hide, the harshness of dye to hold gray at bay… She wasn't a young beauty any more. Now she had to get her way with brains, which wasn't so easy and took longer.
"What can't be cured…" she said, and deliberately turned away from the mirror. The only alternative to getting older was not getting older. The Yankees had gassed her younger brother, Jacob. They'd gassed him, and the Negroes on the Marshlands plantation had murdered him in the uprising of 1915. He'd never had a chance. She'd taken some revenge on them after the war. More still waited. She'd never disagreed with the Freedom Party about that.
She unpacked her own suitcase. Once upon a time, she'd have had a colored maid to do it for her. The last one she'd had came much too close to murdering her in the long aftermath of the uprising. No more.
Once everything was put away, she went downstairs. A man sitting on an overstuffed chair in the lobby, a chair whose upholstery had seen better days, got to his feet and took off his hat. "Evening, Miss Colleton!" he said. "Freedom!"
"Good evening, Mr. Henderson," Anne answered. A beat slower than she should have, she added, "Freedom!" herself. The Party greeting still struck her as foolish. But she'd made the bargain, and she had to go through with it.
"Hope you had a pleasant drive down," James Henderson said. He held out his hand. She briskly shook it. His eyes widened slightly. He hadn't expected so firm a grip. He was a few years younger than Anne- everyone is a few years younger than I am these days, she thought unhappily-lean as a lath, with a face so bony, it might have come off the label of an iodine bottle. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart on his lapel.
"It was all right," Anne said. "Some people drive for the sport of it. I drive to get where I'm going."
"Sensible," Henderson said. Men said that to her a lot these days, as they'd once said, Beautiful. She missed the other. This would have to do. Beauty didn't last. Brains did. She'd realized that a long time ago. She'd had brains even then, though men had done their best not to notice. Henderson went on, "Shall we eat some supper? We can talk then, and figure out where to go from there."
"All right," Anne said. Not so many years earlier, he would have wanted to go back to her room and take her to bed. Now he probably didn't. That made doing business simpler. Most of the time, she appreciated it because it did. Every once in a while, she found herself pining for days gone by.
"Hotel restaurant suit you, or would you rather go somewhere else?" Henderson was doing his best to be polite. A fair number of Freedom Party men either didn't bother or didn't know how.
"The hotel restaurant is fine," she answered.
She ordered crab cakes; she took advantage of Charleston seafood whenever she came down to the coast. Henderson chose fried chicken. They both ordered cocktails. The colored waiter who took their orders went back to the kitchen without writing them down; odds were he couldn't write. James Henderson's eyes followed him. "Wonder where he was in 1915, and what he did."