The Victorious Opposition Read online

  Nellie was cynical enough to wonder how much people were encouraged to cheer. But that wasn’t what really took her by surprise. She said, “You couldn’t get away with thumbing your nose at the Supreme Court like that here in the USA.”

  “Well, ma’am, I’m going to tell you the truth, and the truth is, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” The Confederate beamed and puffed on his cigar as if he’d come up with a profound and original truth. He continued, “Take the niggers, for instance. We’re still settlin’ with them, on account of they got uppity beyond their station since they rose up during the war. They got to learn where they belong, and we’ll teach ’em, too. You got to go on towards where you’re headed no matter what, on account of otherwise you’ll never get there.”

  Although Nellie had no particular use for colored people, she said, “I’m sure I don’t know what burning down people’s houses has got to do with the Supreme Court.”

  “Oh, it’s all part of the same thing,” her customer said earnestly. “That’s the truth. It is.” He might have been talking about the Holy Ghost. “Whatever you have to do, you go ahead and you do that, and you don’t let anything stop you. If you think you can be stopped, you’re in trouble. But if you know you can win, you will.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Nellie said. “You people were sure you were going to win the Great War, but you didn’t.”

  “You can say that if you want to,” the Confederate answered. “You can say it, but that doesn’t make it so. Truth is, we were stabbed in the back. It hadn’t been for the niggers risin’ up, we would’ve whipped you-all. Sure as I’m standing here before you, that’s the gospel truth. Like I said before, they need paying back for that. Now they’re starting to get it. Serves ’em right, if you care about what I think.”

  Since Nellie didn’t, she retreated behind the counter. She hoped this noisy fellow would go away, and she hoped more customers would come in so she’d have an excuse to ignore him. He did eventually get up and leave. He’d put down a dime tip on a bill of half a dollar for a sandwich and coffee, so Nellie forgave him his noise.

  Clara, Nellie’s daughter, came home from school a few minutes later. Nellie stared at her in bemusement, as she often did. Part of her wondered how Clara had got to be fifteen years old, a high-school freshman with a woman’s shape. And part of her simply marveled that Clara was there at all. Nellie had never intended to have a baby by Hal Jacobs. She hadn’t always worried about rubbers simply because she’d thought she didn’t need to worry about catching, either. That proved wrong. And here was Clara, only a couple of years older than her nephew Armstrong Grimes, the son of Clara’s half sister, Edna.

  “Hello, dear,” Nellie said. “What did you learn today?” She always asked. With little book learning herself, she hoped getting more would mean Clara wouldn’t have to work so hard as she had, or have to worry about making some of the mistakes she’d made—and she’d made some humdingers.

  “Quadratic equations in algebra.” Clara made a horrible face. “Diagramming sentences in English.” She made another one. “And in government, how a bill becomes a law.” Instead of a grimace, a yawn. Then she brightened. Her face, like Hal’s, was rounder than Nellie’s, and lit up when she smiled. “And Walter Johansen asked me if I could go to the moving pictures with him this Saturday. Can I, Ma? Please? Wally’s so cute.”

  Nellie’s first impulse was to scream, No! All he wants to do is get your undies down! As she knew—oh, how she knew!—that was true of most men most of the time. But if she made a big fuss about it, she would just make Clara more eager to taste forbidden fruit. She’d found that out raising Edna, and she also remembered as much from her own stormy journey into womanhood a million years before—that was what it felt like, anyhow.

  And so, instead of screaming, she asked, “Which one is Walter? Is he the skinny blond kid with the cowlick?”

  “No, Ma.” Clara clucked, annoyed her mother couldn’t keep her friends straight. “That’s Eddie Fullmer. Walter’s the football player, the one with the blue, blue eyes and the big dimple in his chin.” She sighed.

  That sigh did almost make Nellie yell, No! By the sound of things, it was a word Clara wouldn’t even think about using to Mr. Football Hero. But Nellie made herself think twice. “I suppose you can go with him,” she said, “if he brings you straight back here after the film. You have to promise.”

  “I do! I will! He will! Oh, Ma, you’re swell!” Clara did a pirouette. Skirts were long again, for which Nellie thanked heaven. She wouldn’t have wanted a girl Clara’s age wearing them at the knee or higher, the way they’d been in the 1920s. That was asking for trouble, and girls between fifteen and twenty had an easy enough time finding it without asking. As things were, the skirt swirled out when Clara turned, showing off shapely calves and trim ankles.

  Do I want to be swell? Nellie had her doubts. “I wish your pa would have seen you so grown-up,” she said.

  That sobered Clara. “So do I,” she said quietly. Hal Jacobs had died a couple of years before, of a rare disease: carcinoma of the lung.

  Nellie absently lit a fresh cigarette, and then had to stub it out in a hurry when a customer came in. Clara served him the coffee he ordered. She could handle the coffeehouse at least as well as Nellie, and why not? She’d been helping out here since she was tall enough to see over the top of the stove.

  A few minutes after the customer left, Edna walked into the coffeehouse. Her son Armstrong accompanied her, which he didn’t usually do. Nellie was very fond of Armstrong’s father, Merle Grimes: fonder of him than she’d been of any other man she could think of except perhaps Hal. She was positive she liked Edna’s husband much more than she’d ever liked Edna’s father. If he hadn’t got her pregnant, she wouldn’t have wanted to see him again, let alone marry him.

  Armstrong, on the other hand . . . Yes, he was her grandson. Yes, she loved him on account of that. But he was a handful, no two ways about it, and Nellie was glad he was Edna’s chief worry and not her own.

  Clara reacted to Armstrong the way a cat reacts to a dog that has just galumphed into its house. They’d never got along, not since the days when baby Armstrong pulled toddler Clara’s hair. Now, at thirteen, Armstrong was as tall as she was, and starting to shoot up like a weed.

  “Behave yourself,” Edna told Armstrong—she did know he was a handful, where some mothers remained curiously blind to such things. “I want to talk to your grandma.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Armstrong said.

  “Yet,” Clara put in, not quite sotto enough voce.

  “That’ll be enough of that, Clara,” Nellie said; fair was fair. She gave her attention back to her older daughter. “What’s going on, Edna?”

  “With me?” Edna Grimes shrugged and pulled out a pack of Raleighs. “Not much. I’m just going along, one day at a time.” She lit the cigarette, sucked in smoke, and blew it out. “You can say what you want about the Confederates, Ma, but they make better cigarettes than we do.” Nellie nodded; that was true. Her daughter went on, “No, I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine,” Nellie answered, “or I will be if you give me one of those.” Edna did, then leaned close so Nellie could get a light from hers. After a couple of drags, Nellie said, “I keep telling you, I’m not an old lady yet.” Edna didn’t say anything. Nellie knew what that meant. Not yet. But soon. She drew on the cigarette again. No matter how smooth the smoke was, it gave scant comfort.

  Jake Featherston turned to Ferdinand Koenig. A nasty gleam of amusement sparkled in the Confederate president’s eye. “Think we’ve let him stew long enough, Ferd?” he asked.

  “Should be about right,” the attorney general answered. “Twenty minutes in the waiting room is enough to tick him off, but not enough to where it’s an out-and-out insult.”

  “Heh,” Jake said. “We’ve already taken care of that.” He thumbed the intercom on his desk. “All right, Lulu. You
can let Chief Justice McReynolds come in now.”

  The door to the president’s private office opened. Featherston got only the briefest glimpse of his secretary before James McReynolds swept into the room, slamming the door behind him. He wore his black robes. They added authority to his entrance, but he would have had plenty on his own. Though a few years past seventy, he moved like a much younger man. He’d lost his hair in front, which made his forehead even higher than it would have otherwise. His long face was red with fury.

  “Featherston,” he said without preamble, “you are a son of a bitch.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Jake said equably. “Have a seat.”

  McReynolds shook his head. “No. I don’t even want to be in the same room with you, let alone sit down with you. How dare you, Featherston? How dare you?”

  With a smile, Koenig said, “I think he’s seen the new budget, Mr. President.”

  “You shut up, you—you stinking Party hack,” McReynolds snarled. “I’m here to talk to the head goon. How dare you abolish the Supreme Court?”

  Before answering, Jake chose a fine Habana from the humidor on his desk. He made a production of clipping the end and lighting the cigar. “You torpedoed my river bill,” he said. “No telling how much more trouble you’ll make for me down the line. And so . . .” He shrugged. “Good-bye. I don’t fool around with people who make trouble for me, Mr. Chief Justice. I kill ’em.”

  “But you can’t get rid of the Supreme Court of the Confederate States just like that!” McReynolds snapped his fingers.

  “Hell I can’t. Just like that is right.” Jake snapped his fingers, too. Then he turned to Ferdinand Koenig. “Tell him how, Ferd. You’ve got all the details straight.”

  Actually, the lawyers who worked under the attorney general were the ones who’d got everything straight. But Koenig could keep things straight once the lawyers had set them out for him—and he had notes to help him along. Glancing down at them, he said, “Here’s the first sentence of Article Three of the Confederate Constitution, Mr. Chief Justice. It says—”

  “I know what Article Three of the Constitution says, God damn you!” James McReynolds burst out.

  Koenig shrugged. He had the whip hand, and he knew it. “I’ll quote it anyway, so we keep things straight like the president said. It goes, ‘The judicial power of the Confederate States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.’ ”

  “Yes!” McReynolds stabbed out a furious finger. “And that means you can do whatever you please with or to the district courts, but you have to keep your cotton-pickin’ mitts off the Supreme Court.”

  “No, sir.” The attorney general shook his head. Jake Featherston leaned back in his chair and blew a perfect smoke ring, enjoying the show. Koenig went on, “That’s not what it means, and I can prove it. There was no Supreme Court when the Confederate States started out. None at all. In 1863, just after we finished licking the damnyankees in the War of Secession, Jeff Davis backed a bill setting up a Supreme Court, but it didn’t pass. He was wrangling with Congress the way he usually did, and so the CSA didn’t get a Supreme Court till”—he checked his notes for the exact date—“till May 27, 1866.”

  “But we haven’t been without one since,” James McReynolds insisted. “No one has ever dreamt that we could be without one. It’s . . . unimaginable, is what it is.”

  “No it’s not, on account of I imagined it.” Jake tapped the fine gray ash from his Habana into an ashtray made out of the sawed-off base of a shell casing. “And what I imagine, I do. Ever since I got into the Freedom Party, people have said to me, ‘You don’t dare do this. You don’t dare do that. You don’t dare do the other thing.’ They’re wrong every goddamn time, but they keep saying it. You think you’re so high and mighty in your fancy black robe, you can tell me what I can do and what I can’t. But you better listen to me. Nobody tells Jake Featherston what to do. Nobody. You got that?”

  McReynolds stared at him. “We have Congressional elections coming up this fall, Mr. Featherston. The Whigs and the Radical Liberals will make you pay for your high-handedness.”

  “Think so, do you?” Jake’s grin was predatory. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a five-dollar goldpiece, and let it ring sweetly off the desktop. Thomas Jackson’s bearded countenance stared up at him. “Here’s a Stonewall says we’ll have more men in the next Congress than we do in this one.”

  “You’re on.” McReynolds leaned forward and thrust out his hand. Featherston took it. For an old man, the Supreme Court justice had a strong grip, and he squeezed as if he wished he could break Featherston’s fingers. “The people will know you and your party for what you are.”

  “Who do you think sent us here to do their business?” Jake answered. “We set out to do it, and then you seven sour bastards wouldn’t let us. And now you’ve got the nerve to blame me and the Freedom Party for what you went and did?”

  “That law plainly violated the Constitution,” McReynolds said stubbornly. “If you violate it from now on, who’s going to stand up to you and call you to account?”

  That was the key question. The answer, of course, was nobody. Featherston didn’t say it. If McReynolds couldn’t see it for himself, the president didn’t want to point it out to him. No matter how true it was, better to keep it quiet.

  “You do see, though, Mr. Chief Justice, what we’re doing here is legal as can be?” Ferdinand Koenig said. “You may not like it, but we’ve got the right to do it.”

  “You’re breaking every precedent this country knows,” McReynolds thundered. In the tradition-minded Confederate States, that was an even more serious charge than it might have been in other lands. “You’re not politicians at all. You’re crooks and pirates, that’s what you are.”

  “We’re the folks who won the election, that’s what we are. You forgot it, and you’re going to pay for it,” Jake Featherston said. “And the attorney general asked you a question. I think you’d better answer it.”

  “And if I don’t?” James McReynolds asked.

  With no expression at all in his voice, Featherston answered, “Then you’re a dead man.”

  McReynolds started to laugh. Then he took a second look at the president of the Confederate States. The laughter died unborn. The chief justice’s face went a blotchy yellow-white. “You mean that,” he whispered.

  “You bet I do.” Featherston had a .45 in his desk drawer. No one around the office would fuss if it went off. And he could always persuade a doctor to say McReynolds had died of heart failure. “Mr. McReynolds, I always mean what I say. Some folks don’t want to believe me, but I do. I told you you’d be sorry if you messed with our good laws, and I reckon you are. Now . . . Ferd there asked you a question. He asked if you thought getting rid of you black-robed buzzards was legal. You going to answer him, or do I have to show you I mean what I say? It’s the last lesson you’ll ever get, and you won’t have a hell of a lot of time to cipher it out.”

  The jurist licked his lips. Jake didn’t think he was a coward. But how often did a man meet someone who showed in the most matter-of-fact way possible that he would not only kill him but enjoy doing it? Jake smiled in anticipation. Later, he thought that smile, more than anything else, was what broke McReynolds. Spitting out the words, and coming very close to spitting outright, the chief justice of a court going out of business snarled, “Yes, God damn you, it’s legal. Technically. It’s also a disgrace, and so are both of you.”

  He stormed from the president’s office. As he opened the door, though, he nervously looked back over his shoulder. Was he wondering if Jake would shoot him in the back? I would if I had to, Jake thought. Not now, though. Now McReynolds had backed down. No point to killing a man who’d yielded. The ones who wouldn’t quit—they were the ones who needed killing.

  Koenig said, “Now we find out how much of a stink the Whigs and the Rad Libs kick up about this in the papers and on
the wireless.”

  “Won’t be too much. That’s what Saul says, and I expect he’s right,” Featherston answered. “They’re like McReynolds—they’re starting to see bad things happen to folks who don’t go along with us. How many papers and wireless stations have burned down the past few months?”

  “Been a few,” the attorney general allowed. “Funny how the cops don’t have a hell of a lot of luck tracking down the boys who did it.” He and Jake both laughed. Koenig raised a forefinger. “They did catch—or they said they caught—those fellows in New Orleans. Too bad for the D.A. down there that the jury wouldn’t convict.”

  “We had to work on that,” Jake said. “Harder than we should have, too. That Long who ran for vice president on the Rad Lib ticket, he’s a first-class bastard, no two ways about it. Trouble, and nothing else but. If we hadn’t beat him to the punch, he’d’ve made the Whigs sweat himself. Now he reckons he can make us sweat instead.”

  “Bad mistake,” Koenig said thoughtfully. “Might be the last one he ever makes.”

  “That’s something we don’t want traced back to us, though,” Featherston said. “All the little ones—those are what make people afraid. We can use as many of them as we need. This—this’d be a little too raw just now. We’ve got to nail the lid down tighter. After the elections things’ll be easier—we’ll be able to get away with whatever we need. ’Course, I don’t suppose we’ll need so much then.”

  “McReynolds thinks we’ll lose,” the attorney general observed.

  They both laughed. Jake couldn’t think of the last time he’d heard anything so funny. “That reminds me,” he said. “How are we doing with the politicals?”