Harry Turtledove: The Center Cannot Hold

But after he'd put on butternut… After he'd put on butternut, Emily had got lonely. She'd been used to getting it regular from him, and she wanted to keep getting it regular regardless of whether he was there or not. He'd come home on leave one night to find her on her knees in front of Bedford Cunningham, neither of them wearing any more than they'd been born with.

Pinkard growled, deep in his throat. "Stinking tramp," he muttered. "It was the war, it was the goddamn war, nothin' else but." Even after he'd come back when the fighting stopped, their marriage hadn't survived. Now he lived in the yellow-painted cottage-company housing-all by himself. It was none too clean these days-nothing like the way it had looked when Emily took care of things-but he didn't care. He had only himself to please, and he wasn't what anybody would call a tough audience.

He headed back toward the cottage, part of the stream of big, weary men in overalls and dungarees heading home. He walked by himself, as he always did these days. Another, similar, stream was coming in: the swing shift. It had a few more blacks mixed in than the outgoing day shift, but only a few. Blacks had taken a lot of better jobs during the war; now whites had almost all of them back.

"Hey, Jeff!" One of the whites waved to him. "Freedom!"

"Freedom!" Pinkard echoed. "When you gonna get your ass to another Party meeting, Travis?"

"I be go to hell if I know," the other steel worker answered. "When they take me off swing, I reckon, but God only knows when that is. Remember me to the boys tonight, will you?"

"Sure will," Pinkard said. "That's a promise." He walked on. When he got to the cottage, he lit a kerosene lamp (there was talk about putting electricity into the company housing, but so far it was nothing but talk), got a fire going in the coal-burning stove, and took a ham out of the icebox. He cut off a big slice and fried it in lard, then did up some potatoes in the same iron frying pan. The beer in the icebox was homebrew-Alabama had been formally dry since before the war-but it washed down supper as well as anything storebought could have.

He put the plate and the frying pan in the sink, atop a teetering mountain of dirty dishes. One day soon he'd have to wash them, because he was running out of clean ones. "Not tonight, Josephine," he muttered; he'd started talking to himself now that he was the only one in the house. "I got important things to do tonight, by God."

He scraped stubble from his chin with a straight razor, splashed on water, and then shed his overalls and work shirt for a clean white shirt and a pair of butternut wool trousers. He wished he had time to shine his shoes, but a glance at the wind-up alarm clock ticking on his nightstand told him he didn't, not if he wanted to get to the meeting on time. And there was nothing in the world he wanted more.

The trolley stopped at the edge of the company housing. Looking back over his shoulder, Jeff saw the mills throwing sparks into the night sky, almost as if it were the Fourth of July. A couple of other men came up to wait for the trolley. They too wore white shirts and khaki trousers. "Freedom!" Jefferson Pinkard said.

"Freedom!" they echoed.

Jeff sighed. Back in the days before Grady Calkins had shot down President Hampton when he came to Birmingham, a lot more men would have come to Party meetings. The Freedom Party had looked like the wave of the future then. Now… Only the dedicated, the men who really saw something wrong with the CSA and saw that Jake Featherston knew how to fix it, went to Freedom Party meetings these days. And even now… "Where's Virgil?" Jeff asked.

Both other men shrugged. "Don't rightly know," one of them said. "He was at the foundry, so I don't reckon he's feelin' poorly."

Bell clanging, the trolley came up. Jeff was glad to climb aboard and drop five cents in the fare box so he wouldn't have to think about what Virgil's absence might mean. He was also glad to pay a fare measured in cents and not in thousands or millions of dollars. After the war, inflation had ripped the guts out of the Confederate States. Its easing had hurt the Freedom Party, too, but that was one bargain Pinkard was willing to make.

Several more men in white shirts and butternut trousers got on the trolley at its next few stops. Jeff liked the uniform look they had. It reminded him of the days when he and a lot of others who were now Freedom Party members had worn Confederate butternut together. They'd been fighting for something important then, just as they were now. They'd lost then. This time, by Jesus, we won't!

The Freedom Party men all got out at the same stop. Not far away stood the old livery stable where the Party met in Birmingham. As a livery stable, the place was a failure, with motorcars and trucks driving more horses off the road every year. As a meeting hall, it was

… Tolerable, Jeff thought.

But he was smiling as he went inside. This was where he belonged. Emily was gone. She was gone, at least in part, because the Freedom Party had come to mean so much to him. Whatever the reason, though, she was gone. The Party remained. This was such family as he had left.

Party members crowded the floor. The hay bales on which men had once sat weren't there any more. Folding chairs replaced them. Their odor, though, and that of horses, still lingered in the building. The smells had probably soaked into the pine boards of the wall.

Jeff found a seat near the rostrum at the front. He shook hands with several men sitting close by. "Freedom!" they said. Pinkard had to be careful to whom he used the Party greeting at the Sloss Works. Whigs and especially Radical Liberals had no use for it.

Caleb Briggs, the Freedom Party leader in Birmingham, ascended to the rostrum and stood behind the podium, waiting for everyone's attention. The short, scrawny dentist looked very crisp, the next thing to military, even if he'd never be handsome. Party men who'd been standing around chatting slipped into their seats like schoolboys fearing the paddle.

"Freedom!" Briggs said.

"Freedom!" the members chorused, Jefferson Pinkard's shout one among many.

"I can't hear you." Briggs might have been a preacher heating up his congregation.

"Freedom!" they shouted again, louder-but not loud enough to suit Caleb Briggs, who cupped a hand behind his ear to show he still couldn't hear. "FREEDOM!" they roared. Pinkard's throat felt raw after that.

"Better," the leader allowed. Jeff heard him through ringing ears, almost as if after an artillery bombardment. Briggs took a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his white shirt. "I have a couple of important announcements tonight," he said. "First one is, we'll be looking for an assault squad to hit a Whig rally Saturday afternoon." A host of hands shot into the air. Briggs grinned. "See me after the meeting. You need to know there'll be cops there, and they're taking a nastier line with us after the unfortunate incident." That was what the Party called President Hampton's assassination.

"I'll go," Pinkard muttered. "By God, I want to go." He hadn't been a brawler before he got conscripted, but he was now.

"Second thing," Briggs said briskly. "The damnyankees are backing the Popular Revolutionaries in the civil war down in the Empire of Mexico. Goddamn lickspittle Richmond government isn't doing anything about that but fussing. We need to do more. The Party's looking to raise a regiment of volunteers for the Emperor, to show the greasers how it's supposed to be done. If you're interested in that, see me after the meeting, too."

Jeff kept fidgeting in his seat through the rest of Briggs' presentation, and the rest of the meeting, too. Not even the patriotic songs and the ones from the trenches held his interest. He swarmed forward as soon as he got the chance. "I want to volunteer for both," he said.