The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Read online

  If it hadn’t been for the War—was the basic theme stated with variations suited to the particular circumstance. If it hadn’t been for the War the most energetic young men and women would not turn to emigration; foreigners would not visit the United States with condescending contempt; the great powers would think twice before sending troops to “restore order” every time one of their citizens was molested and our own inadequate police forces were unable to protect him. If it hadn’t been for the War it would be possible to live like a self-respecting human being, to work reasonable hours for wages that would buy decent food and clothing instead of shoddy.

  Perhaps because of the ever increasing hostility to immigrants which culminated in the virtual barring of the country to all, little mention was ever made of Grandfather Backmaker. No enlarged crayon portrait of him hung anywhere, much less over the mantel. Somehow I got the impression my father’s father had been not only a foreigner by birth, but a shady character in his own right, a man who actually believed in the things for which Granpa Hodgins had fought. I don’t know how I learned that Grandfather Backmaker had made speeches advocating equal rights for Negroes or protesting the mass lynchings so popular in the North, in contrast to the humane treatment accorded these noncitizens in the Confederacy. Nor did I remember how I found out he had been run out of several places before finally settling in Wappinger Falls or that all his life people had muttered darkly at his back, “Dirty Abolitionist!”—a very deep imprecation indeed. I only know that as a consequence of this taint my father, a meek, hardworking, worried little man, was completely dominated by my mother who never let him for-get that a Hodgins or a McCormick was worth dozens of Backmakers.

  I must have been a great trial to her for I showed no signs of proper Hodgins gumption, such as she had a right to expect in her only child. For one thing I was remarkably unhandy and awkward; of little use in the hundred necessary chores around our dilapidated house. I could not pick up a hammer at her command to do something about fixing the loose weatherboards on the east side without mashing my thumb or splitting the aged, unpainted wood. I could not hoe the kitchen garden without damaging precious vegetables and leaving weeds intact. I could shovel snow in the winter at a tremendous rate for I was strong and had endurance, but work requiring manual dexterity baffled me. I fumbled in harnessing Bessie, our mare, or hitching her to the cart for my father’s trips to Poughkeepsie, and as for helping him on the farm or in his smithy—from which most of our meager cash income came—I’m afraid my efforts drove that mild man nearest to a temper he ever experienced. He would lay the reins on the plowhorse’s back or his hammer down on the anvil and say mournfully, “Better see if you can help your mother, Hodge. You’re only in my way here.”

  I REMEMBER THE TIME a trackless locomotive—minibiles, they were called—broke down not a quarter of a mile from Father’s smithy. This was a golden, unparalleled, unbelievable opportunity. Minibiles, like any other luxury, were rare in the United States though they were common enough in prosperous countries like the German Union or the Confederacy. We had to rely for our transportation on the never-failing horse or on the railroads, wornout and broken down as they were. For decades the great issue in Congress was the never completed Pacific transcontinental line, though Canada had one and the Confederate States seven. (Though sailing balloons were in frequent use they were still looked upon as somehow “impractical.”) Only a rare millionaire with the connections in Berlin, Washington-Baltimore or Leesburg could afford the indulgence of the costly and complicated minibile which required a trained driver in order to bounce over the rutted and chuckholed roads. Only one of an extraordinarily adventurous spirit would leave the tar-surfaced streets of New York or its sister city of Brooklyn, where the solid rubber tires of the minibiles could at worst find traction on the horse or cable-car rails, for the morasses or washboard roads which were the only highways north of the Harlem River.

  When such a one did it was inevitable that the jolting, jouncing and shaking it received would break or disconnect one of the delicate parts in its complex mechanism. Then the only recourse—apart from telegraphing back to the city if the traveler were fortunate enough to break down near an instrument—was to the closest blacksmith. Smiths rarely knew much of the principles of the minibiles, but with the broken part before them they could fabricate a passable duplicate and, unless the machine had suffered serious damage, put it back in place. It was customary for such a craftsman to compensate himself for the time taken away from horseshoeing or spring-fitting (or just absently chewing on an oatstraw) by demanding exorbitant remuneration, amounting to perhaps 25 or 30 cents an hour, thus revenging his rural poverty and self-sufficiency upon the effete wealth and helplessness of the urban excursionist.

  Such a golden opportunity befell my father, as I said, during the fall of 1933 when I was twelve years old. The driver had made his way to the smithy, leaving the owner of the minibile marooned and fuming in the enclosed passenger seat. A hasty visit convinced Father—who could repair a clock or broken rake with equal dexterity—that his only course was to bring the machine to the forge since a part, not easy to disassemble, had been bent and needed heating and straightening. (The driver, the owner, and Father all repeated the name of the part often enough, but so inept have I been with “practical” things all my life that I couldn’t recall it ten minutes later, much less after more than 30 years.)

  “Hodge,” he said, “run and get the mare and ride over to Jones’s. Don’t try to saddle her—go bareback. Ask Mr. Jones to kindly lend me his team.”

  “I’ll give the boy a quarter dollar for himself if he’s back with the team within twenty minutes,” added the owner of the minibile, sticking his head out of the window.

  I won’t say I was off like the wind, for my life’s work has given me a distaste for exaggeration or hyperbole, but I moved faster than I ever had before. A quarter, a whole shining silver quarter, a day’s full wage for a boy, half the day’s pay of a grown man—all for myself, to spend as I wished.

  I ran all the way to the barn, led Bessie out by her halter and jumped on her broad back, my enthralling daydream growing and deepening each moment. With my quarter safely got I could perhaps persuade my father to take me along on his next trip to Poughkeepsie; in the shops there I could find some yards of figured cotton for Mother, or a box of cigars to which Father was partial but rarely bought for himself, or an unimagined something for Mary McCutcheon, temporarily the acme of feminine charm to me.

  Or I could take the entire quarter into Newman’s Book and Stationery Store. Here I could not afford to buy one of the latest English or Confederate books—even the novels I disdained cost 50 cents in their original and 30 in the pirated United States’ edition—but what treasures there were in the twelve and a half cent reprints and the dime classics!

  With Bessie’s legs moving steadily beneath me I pored over in my imagination Mr. Newman’s entire stock. Now, my quarter would buy two reprints, but I would read them in as many evenings and be no better off than before until their memory faded and I could read them again. Better to invest in paperbacked adventure stories giving sharp, breathless pictures of life in the West or rekindling the glories of the War. True, they were written almost entirely by Confederate authors and I was, thanks perhaps to the portrait of Granpa Hodgins and my mother’s hard patriotism, a devout partisan of the lost cause of Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas. But patriotism could not steel me against the excitement of the Confederate paperbacks; literature simply disregarded the boundary stretching to the Pacific.

  I had finally determined to invest all my 25 cents, not in five paperbound volumes but in ten of the same in secondhand or shopworn condition, when I suddenly became aware I had been riding Bessie for some considerable time. I looked around, rather dazed by the abrupt translation from the dark and slightly musty interior of Newman’s bookstore to the bright countryside, to find with dismay that Bessie hadn’t taken me to the Jones farm after all but on some privat
e tour of her own in the opposite direction.

  I’m afraid this little anecdote is pointless (it was momentarily pointed enough for me that particular evening, for in addition to the loss of the promised quarter I received a thorough whacking with a willow switch from my mother after my father had, as usual, dolefully refused his parental duty) except that it shows that in pursuing the dream I could lose the reality.

  My feeling that books were a part of life, and the most important part, was no passing phase. Other boys in their early teens dreamed of going to Dakotah, indenting to a company run by a young and beautiful woman (this was a favorite theme of many of the paperbacks), discovering the loot hidden by a gang, or emigrating to Australia or the South African Republic. Or else they faced the reality of carrying on the family farm, petty trade, or indenture. I only wanted to be allowed to read.

  The school at Wappinger Falls taught as little as possible as quickly as possible; parents needed the help of their children to survive or to build up a small reserve in the illusory hope of buying free of their indenture. Both my mother and my teachers looked askance at my desire to persist in my studies past an age when my contemporaries were making themselves economically useful.

  Nor—even supposing I had the fees—could the Academy at Poughkeepsie provide me with what I wanted. There was no money for Yale, Harvard, or Columbia, those increasingly decayed and provincialized colleges which contrasted so painfully with the great and flourishing universities of the Confederacy or Europe. Indeed our financial position was very bad and there was often talk of my father selling the smithy and indenting.

  I was of no help; rather I was one who ate three meals a day and occupied a bed. Yet when I spoke of trying to get more learning my mother went into a perfect fury at the very mention of such idleness and self-indulgence. My father merely shrugged resignedly. Only Agnes Jones who had supplanted Mary McCutcheon sympathized and encouraged me. Unhappily, her plans for my future were limited to marrying her and helping her father on his farm, which didn’t seem to me any great advance over what I had to look forward to at home.

  I was increasingly conscious too of the looks and smiles which followed me. A great lout of seventeen, too lazy to do a stroke of work, always wandering around with his head in the clouds or lying with his nose stuck in a book. Too bad—and the Backmakers such hardworking folks too. Wappinger Falls was intolerable.

  A few months before my eighteenth birthday then, I packed my three most cherished books in my good white cotton shirt, and having bade a most romantic goodbye to Agnes (which certainly would have eventuated in the consummation of all her hopes had her father discovered us), I set out on foot for New York.

  II

  New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million, having grown gradually but steadily since the close of the War of Southron Independence. Together with the half million in the city of Brooklyn this represented by far the greatest concentration of people in the United States, though of course it could not compare with the great Confederate centers of Washington (now including Baltimore and Alexandria), St. Louis, or Leesburg (once Mexico City).

  The country boy who had never seen anything more metropolitan than Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed. Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as 59th Street on the west side and all the way to 87th on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown transportation with a line every few blocks. Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as flies, darting ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing vans, carts and wagons. Prancing trotters drew private carriages, buggies, broughams, victorias, hansoms, dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen nor horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional minibiles chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over cobblestones or asphalt.

  Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed overhead, crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting upward into offices and flats or downward into stores, a reminder that no family with pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor and every child learned the Morse code before he could read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly their own; they perched and swung, quarrelled and scolded on them, leaving only to satisfy their voracity upon the steaming mounds of horsedung below.

  Buildings of eight or ten storeys were common, and there were many of fourteen or fifteen, serviced by pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention which permitted the erection of veritable skyscrapers in Washington and Leesburg. Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air, guided and controlled as skillfully as an old time sailing vessel.

  Most exciting of all was simply the number of people who walked, rode, or merely stood around on the streets. It seemed hardly believable that so many humans could crowd themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded, touts wheedled, peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted. Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies stared, drunks staggered. For long moments I paused, standing stock still, not thinking of going anywhere, merely watching the spectacle.

  I had hardly begun to fondle the sharp edge of wonder when darkness fell and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by telegraphic sparks, glowed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever had been drab and dingy in daylight—and even my eyes had not been blind to the signs of dirt and decay—became in an instant magically enchanting, softened and shadowed into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air with a relish I had never felt for that of the country and knew myself for the first time to be spiritually at home.

  But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for an eighteen year old; I began to feel the need for food and rest. The three dollars in my pocket I was resolved to hoard, not having any notion how to go about replenishing it. I could not do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the first gaslit bakery, buying a penny loaf, and walked slowly through the entrancing streets, munching on it.

  Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by porters with long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting, each heralded with a boldly lettered broadside or dashingly drawn cartoon advertising the amusement to be found within. I was sorely tempted to see for myself this magical entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave the illusion of motion, but the lowest price of admission was five cents. Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized in the incredible phonotos—tinugraphs which were ingeniously combined with a sound-producing machine operated by compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to move, but to talk—actually charged ten or even fifteen cents for an hour’s spectacle.

  By now I ached with tiredness; the insignificant bundle of shirt and books had become a burden. I was pressed by the question of where to sleep, but I didn’t connect the glass transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the unpainted letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL with my need, for I was looking for the urban version of the inn at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie Commercial House. I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred impressions of still newer marvels, so that I am not entirely sure whether it was merely one or a succession of enchanting girls who offered delights for a quarter. I know I was solicited by crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly in defiance of the laws of the United States and that an incredible number of beggars accosted me.

  At last I thought of asking directions from one of the multitude on the wooden or granite sidewalks. But without realizing it I had wandered from thronged, brightly lit avenues into an unpeopled, darkened area where buildings were low and frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a kerosene lamp in windows far apart were unrivalled by any streetlights.

  My ears had been deafened all day by the clop of hooves, the rattling of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the empty street seemed unnaturally still. The suddenly looming figure of another walker was the luckiest of chances.

  “Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where’s the nearest inn, or anywhere I can get a bed for the night che
ap?”

  I felt him peering at me. “Rube, huh? Much money you got?”

  “Th—Not very much. That’s why I want to find cheap lodging.”

  “OK, Reuben—come along.”

  “Oh, don’t trouble to show me. Just give me an idea how to get there.”

  He grunted. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all.”

  Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip he steered me along. For the first time I began to feel alarm. However, before I could even attempt to shrug free, he had shoved me into the mouth of an alley discernible only because its absolute blackness contrasted with the relative darkness of the street.

  “Wait—” I began.

  “In here, Reuben. Soundest night’s sleep you’ve had in a long time. And cheap—it’s free.”

  I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held me. Before I could even begin to think, however, a terrific blow fell on the right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the blackness of insensibility.

  I WAS RECALLED to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skull bones. Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors around me.

  The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an outhouse—many outhouses—nearby. The ground I lay upon was damp with the water of endless dishwashings and launderings. The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In addition there was the smell of death—not the sweetish effluvium of blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull-calf or hog knows—but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh. Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.