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"Oh, I don't know." Wiggins' voice was dry. "He told me you were sharp as a tack but a first-class bitch, and that doesn't seem so far out to me."
"I'm sure he meant it as an insult, but I'll take it for a compliment," A
"Jake Featherston."
A
"On account of what I saw when I went to Philadelphia, ma'am," he replied. "The United States don't respect you when you're weak. If you're down, they'll kick you. But if you're strong, they have got to sit up and take notice. That's a fact."
"I agree with that. I think everyone in the Confederate States agrees with that," A
"Well, there you are," Wiggins said cheerily. "If you agree with that, the Freedom Party is really and truly the only place for you, because-"
"Nonsense." A
"I don't think the clouds are as black as you say, ma'am," Wiggins replied. "Yes, we lost a couple of seats in the election last November, but not as many as people said we would. We'll be back-you wait and see if we aren't. Folks don't have much in the way of memory-and besides, ma'am, we're right."
"If you can't win an election, whether you're right or not doesn't matter," A
"We will." Wiggins sounded confident. She got the idea he sounded confident all the time. He went on, "I want to say a couple of other things, and then I'm through. First one is, Mr. Featherston, he knows who's for him, and he knows who's against him, and he never, ever, forgets the one or the other."
He was, without question, right about that. Featherston was as relentless as a barrel smashing through one line of trenches after another. A
Edward C.L. Wiggins chuckled. "He told me you were near as stubborn as he is himself, and I see he's right. One more thing, and then I'm through, and I won't trouble you any more."
"Go ahead," A
"Yes, ma'am. Here's what I've got to say: there's only one party in the CSA that's got any notion at all about what the devil to do about the nigger problem in this country, and that's the Freedom Party. And now I'm done. Good-bye." He surprised her by hanging up.
Slowly, she put the mouthpiece back on its hook and set down the telephone. She said a word she was unlikely to use in public, one that would have made strong men gasp and women of delicate sensibilities blush and faint. Wiggins had known how to get through to her, after all. No one was likely to forget the Red Negro uprising that had tied the Confederacy in knots late in 1915 and early in 1916. No one knew how much it had helped the USA win the war, but it couldn't have hurt. The Freedom Party stood foursquare for vengeance, and so did A
And why not? she thought. One brother dead, my plantation wrecked, me almost murdered… Oh, yes, I owe those black bastards just a little. The whole country owes them just a little, whether the Whigs and the Radical Liberals want to admit it or not.
She repeated that word, louder this time. Behind her, her surviving brother burst out laughing. She whirled around. "Confound it, Tom," she said angrily, "I didn't know you were there."
Tom Colleton laughed harder than ever. "I'll bet you didn't," he answered. "If you had, you would have said something like, 'Confound it,' instead." He was a couple of years younger than A
She shrugged now. "I probably would have. But I meant what I did say."
"Who was on the telephone?" he asked.
"A man named Edward C.L. Wiggins," A
Tom frowned. "Those people don't take no for an answer, do they?"
"They never have," A
"Did you find out why he travels with a herd of initials?" her brother asked. She shook her head. Tom went on, "What did you tell him?"
"No, of course," A
"Don't blame you a bit," Tom Colleton said. "He's an impressive man in a lot of ways, but…" He shook his head. "He puts me in mind of a time bomb, wound up and waiting to go off. And when he does, I don't think it'll be pretty."
"There were times when I thought he had all the answers," A
"Scared me, too," Tom agreed, "and we don't scare easy."
"No. We'd be dead by now if we did," A
Her brother nodded again. "Sure is. Bought it from what's-his-name, the Jew tailor. And I'm going to pay a call on Bertha Talmadge in a little while."
Before the war, A
A
He didn't get angry at her, as he would have before the war. In fact, he nodded again himself. "You're right. I should. And, as a matter of fact, so should you."
"That's different," A
"How?"
Because he was her brother, she told him: "Because my husband would want to try to run everything, because that's what men do. And odds are he wouldn't be as good at it as I am. That's why."
"And even if he was, you wouldn't admit it," Tom said.
That was also true. A
M ary McGregor was only thirteen years old, but her course in life was already set. So she told herself, anyhow, and also told her mother and her older sister as they sat down to supper on their farm outside Rosenfeld, Manitoba: "The Yankees killed my brother. They killed my father, too. But I'm going to get even-you see if I don't."
Fright showed on her mother's careworn face. Maude McGregor touched the sleeve of her woolen blouse to show Mary she still wore mourning black. "You be careful," she said. "If anything happened to you after Alexander and Arthur, I don't think I could bear it."