The President of the United States of America leaned towards his guest.
“This year when you march on Philadelphia,” he said quietly but with an iron purpose, “I give you my word that will stand beside you on the steps of City Hall when you address the nation.”
Chapter 57
“You gotta tell me where we’re going sooner or later, Pa?” Isaac Cheney suggested respectfully in an unnaturally timid voice for such an obviously vigorous and well-constructed young man.
Father and son were sitting in the window of the greasy diner on a dusty road near the ever-expanding city limits of the state capital. Galen Cheney viewed his younger son with a thoughtfulness that almost amounted to indulgence.
“I reckon we’ll head up to Vicksburg via Natchez. After that we’ll head over to Jackson and Meridian on Interstate 20.”
“We’re headed for Meridian?”
The father shook his head.
“No, there are brothers and sisters in Atlanta who need our help, son.”
Isaac Cheney thought about the two long guns he had lovingly cared for these last few months now stored in the hidden compartment in the trunk of the rusty old Dodge parked outside the diner.
“What’s in Atlanta, Pa?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there. That won’t be for two or three days. There’s no hurry and we don’t want any trouble with state troopers.”
Isaac grinned nervily.
The only person he had ever felt comfortable with was his father; the man he knew — much to his confusion — seemed to terrify everybody else. Even his big brother Mickey was afraid of Pa although Isaac had never seen his father raise his hand to him.
Pa and Mickey had had some kind of fight the morning they left Texas City; something to do with the girl Sarah Jane that Pa had made him go with the night before. Pa had said Sarah Jane would cry but that he had to be strong.
She had cried when he had gone with her. Later she had sobbed and turned her back on him; he had taken her from behind, anyway. She had stopped crying after that and he had felt dirty. Sarah Jane was pretty, maybe twelve or thirteen, the same age as his dead sister Hannah. Although Hannah would be older now, of course. He ought to have let Sarah Jane alone after he had defiled her that second time but she had smelled so good and she had been so, well, helpless, that he had rolled her onto her back and despoiled her one last time as she lay, unmoving, coldly oblivious beneath his flailing loins. He would not have hit her so hard if she had not been such a whore…
Isaac gathered up every scrap of courage.
“Are we doing God’s work in Atlanta, Pa?”
“Men like us are always doing God’s work, son.”
Isaac Cheney smiled, inwardly warmed by his father’s reassuring words but he still wondered what awaited them in Atlanta. He recollected that Atlanta was from where that murdering godforsaken criminal Sherman had marched through Georgia. History was not really Isaac’s thing; he did not have the memory for it, all those fact and figures, places and people! People were trouble, that much he had learned in his twenty some years. His sisters had made fun of him, his Ma had treated him like he was a retard or something, only his Pa had understood, only Pa seen his world through his eyes and understood. One day Pa had stood at the school gate and after that none of the other kids ever made fun of him, the gangs left him alone, nobody talked to him and that had suited him just fine. The teachers had stopped giving him work to take home, never asked him to read aloud again in class; it was around then he had picked a fight with two kids because he thought he could but his Ma had chased him out of the house with a stick when he got home, so he had never done that again.
Isaac had hated leaving home without shaking his Mickey’s hand. Mickey had always looked after him when Pa was not around, Mickey understood him too, just not in the way Pa did.
When he was packing up the Dodge, Mickey had given him that look.
‘You don’t even know what you’ve done wrong,’ he had muttered accusingly.
‘I just done what Pa told me to do, Mickey…’
The protest had fallen on cruelly deaf ears.
It was not as if Mickey had not done bad things when they had been up in Bellingham. He had shot men, gone with women in the beginning before everything went crazy.
Trophy sniper.
That was what the guys in charge in Bellingham had called Isaac.
Mickey had been his spotter; he had drawn the bead, the long rifle rock steady in his nerveless hands and a mile away another spy, or trespasser, or mountain goat or deer had gone down.
Looking back those first three months in Bellingham had been the happiest days of his life. It had been him and Mickey together, out in the woods most of the time, stalking, waiting, and killing.
‘You’ve gone with lots of girls!’ Isaac had retorted, thinking his argument perfectly unanswerable.
‘I’ve never been with a woman who didn’t want to go with me!’ Mickey had snapped back instantly with a speed and venom that had disorientated the younger brother, much as if a stinging right cross had slammed into the flat of his jaw. ‘I’ve never gone with a child!’
Isaac had been utterly lost.
Woman, child, girl?
What did that have to do with anything?
The last he had seen of his brother was Mickey’s back as he stomped away shaking his head.
“Mickey said I did wrong with Sarah Jane, Pa?” He voiced before he could stop himself.
Galen Cheney put down his cup.
“Woman was made of Adam’s rib,” he sniffed. He viewed his son with agate hard eyes for several seconds. “Woman must submit to Man’s dominion, boy. That is the way of things. Remember Genesis. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them and said unto them be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over every living thing that moveth over the earth!”
No, Isaac remembered none of that.
“A man is not a man,” his father declared as if reading from holy writ carved into the living rock of the tablets in his hand, “until he has impregnated his seed into a woman. Procreation is our sacred duty to God.”
“Sarah Jane cried, Pa?”
Galen Cheney guffawed and shook his head.
“Women cry a lot, son.”
Chapter 58
Lyndon Baines Johnson honestly did not know if the pact he had made with his President in the darkest hours of the Battle of Washington was worth a mess of beans. He had not walked away from their solemn handshake with overly high expectations; anticipating being shot down by the Kennedy camp’s Irish Mafia sooner rather than later. Basically, he had been playing things day by day. But then Kenny O’Donnell, the ultimate Kennedy insider had stood down and his own man, Marvin Watson had been endorsed as his replacement as White House Appointment Secretary, the President’s de facto Chief of Staff. Suddenly, the raucous voices of the Boston and Chicago factions were being drowned out by, well, reason at last and as he stepped on more and more toes and ruffled more and more feathers, nobody close to the President had so much as raised a finger to stop him let alone said ‘boo’ to a passing goose.