How Few Remain Read online

  "And I do further urge and direct the citizens of the United States to observe the twenty-second day of April in each succeeding year as a day of humiliation and remembrance, so that the infamous defeat we have suffered on this date shall never be lost from the minds of the said citizens until such time as it may, by the grace of God, be avenged a hundredfold."

  The clicker fell silent. Several men sighed. Sam realized he wasn't the only one who'd been holding his breath toward the end. Clay Herndon said, "Well, well, who would have thought it? Even James G. Blaine can read the writing on the wall, provided only that you make the letters big enough."

  "The writing on the wall, eh?" Sam said. "That must be why he blamed God for our losing, or one reason for it, anyhow. The other two that spring to mind are that God doesn't vote, and He hardly ever stands up on His hind legs and calls someone a damned liar."

  Outside, church bells began to ring out. Noise on the street swiftly swelled: shouts and cheers and snatches of song. Here and there, gunshots rang out. One of them sounded as if it came from right outside the offices. Somebody yelled, "That's the boy, Reuben! Shoot 'em all off—we ain't gonna need 'em no more." Another shot shattered the morning, presumably from Reuben's gun.

  "We aren't the only ones with the news," Herndon observed. "That one would have gone to a whole raft of telegraph instruments."

  "Everybody who has it likes it, too," Edgar Leary said.

  Samuel Clemens made himself stop thinking like an American delighted the war had indeed ended—regardless of the terms on which it had ended—and start thinking like a newspaperman again. "Half the people who've got the word print papers of their own," he growled. "Out of that bunch, we're going to be the ones who put the news on the street first, or I'll know the reason why."

  That blunt announcement sent people flying away from the telegraph clicker as if it had suddenly become red-hot. One of the typesetters yelled, "We'll need a transcript of what Blaine had to say. If somebody writes it out, it'll be a hell of a lot faster to set than if we've got to do it from the Morse."

  "Clay, you take care of that," Sam said. "You've already read it through once, so you've got a head start on everybody else. Headline above it will be 'War Ends'—screamer type, of course."

  "You want seventy-two point?" the typesetter asked.

  "No, ninety-six, Charlie," Clemens answered. "Hell, 108 if you've got it. That's not a headline we get to use every day. If only we could write Blaine Tarred, Feathered, and Ridden Out of Philadelphia on a Rail underneath it, everything would be perfect." He hesitated. "Well, almost perfect: we'd have to drop the type size a good deal to fit that on one line."

  "Boss, you'll give us an editorial to run alongside of Blaine's statement?" Leary said.

  "What?" Sam frowned. "Oh. Yes, I suppose I'd better, hadn't I?"

  He went back to his desk, swept a snowdrift of papers out of the way so he'd have room to write, and set a fresh sheet down in the middle of the space he'd cleared. After he'd inked a pen, he stared at the blank paper. For a man who wrote for a living, getting started was always the hardest part of the job.

  Words did not want to come. He'd set everybody else on the Morning Call running like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail, and the words did not want to come. He glared at the paper. He glared at the pen. The fault was not in them. He knew where the fault was. He did not have a mirror at his desk, so he could not glare at himself.

  He took out a cigar, scraped a match afire, and lighted the malodorous stogie. Neither the harsh smoke he held in his mouth nor the stinking fogbank with which he surrounded himself helped concentrate his mind on the business at hand, as they often did. He smoked the cigar down to a dank, soggy butt with quick, angry puffs, then lighted another. Nothing even vaguely resembling inspiration struck.

  Setting the second cigar in the grimy brass ashtray that held the corpse of the first, he opened a desk drawer. If inspiration wasn't lurking in tobacco today, maybe it was hiding somewhere else. He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and took a long swig. Whiskey ran molten down his throat. His eyes opened very wide. He took another drink. It exploded in his stomach like a ten-inch shell from a British ironclad. He felt ready to whip his weight in wildcats.

  He picked up the pen and poised it above the paper. No words came out. He was as silent and frustrated as a veteran actor—say, one of the Booth brothers, whose careers went back before the War of Secession, and whose tours had crisscrossed the USA and the CSA ever since—inexplicably stricken with stage fright in front of a packed house.

  Clay Herndon trotted up to him, carrying a sheet full of words from edge to edge and top to bottom. Sam ground his teeth, even though he knew the words were Blaine's and not Herndon's. "Here's the transcription of the statement," Herndon said, waving it about. "I'll give it to the typesetters. What are you going to say in your—?" Most of a sentence too late, his eye fell on the still-blank page in front of Clemens.

  Sam's eye fell on it, too . . . balefully. "Damned if I know," he ground out.

  "Even if it's only 'Mary had a little lamb,' you'd better say it fast," Herndon said. "You were right—we can't be the only paper getting a new edition to press as fast as we can set the type."

  "I know, God damn it, but I'm dry," Sam said. "I haven't been this dry since the stagecoach ride through the desert from Salt Lake to Virginia City."

  "You've got to say something," Herndon insisted.

  "Yes, but what?" Clemens said. "What the devil can I say that Blaine didn't already? The war's done. We lost. Any fool can see that, and even a fool can see it now, or Blaine wouldn't have given up. The thing is so obvious, it's impossible to write about without sounding like an idiot." Herndon didn't say anything. Sam caught him not saying anything. "When has that ever stopped me before, eh?"

  "You can't prove that's what I was thinking," the reporter answered with a grin.

  "And a damned lucky thing for you I can't, too," Sam said. "Go on, get that set. I'll come up with something in the next few minutes, or else we just have to go on without me." He didn't like that. It was embarrassing. But getting the news out on the street third would be a lot more embarrassing. Herndon dashed away to the typesetters.

  It's over. Almost of its own will, Clemens' pen set down two words. He stared at them. They came close to serving as an editorial by themselves. What else did he need to say? He thought about that for a few seconds, then wrote one more sentence: Thank heaven! He nodded, picked up the paper, and hurried after Clay Herndon.

  Author's Note

  This is a novel about the aftermath of a Confederate victory in the Civil War. It is not in any sense a sequel to my earlier novel about a Confederate victory in the Civil War, The Guns of the South. Here, the Confederacy is imagined to have won by natural causes, so to speak, rather than by intervention from time-travelers with an agenda of their own, and to have done so in 1862 rather than 1864.

  The differences are crucial. The Civil War is, and deserves to be, perhaps the most intensely examined period of American history. For better and for worse, all that the United States is today (even that we say The United States is, not The United States are), it is because of what happened in and immediately after the Civil War. Change anything there, and subsequent history changes drastically.

  Take the three cigars around which Lee's Special Order 191 was wrapped. In real history, two Union soldiers, Corporal Barton Mitchell and First Sergeant John Bloss, discovered them after a Confederate courier lost them. Learning Lee's battle plan and how widely Lee had divided his army while invading U.S. territory let General McClellan win the battle of Antietam. That victory, in turn, let Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the moral character of the war. It effectively made sure that Britain and France, which were at the time trembling on the brink of recognizing the Confederate States and forcing mediation on the United States, did not do so.

  Had those cigars and that order not been lost . . . the world would be a diff
erent place today.

  I need to make a couple of remarks about my handling of the characters in this novel. All speeches and writings attributed to Samuel Clemens, in particular, are of my own devising. The same does not apply to the political speeches I have put in the mouth of Abraham Lincoln. In them, I have frequently used his own words on the relationship between labour and capital and between employee and employer, sometimes verbatim, sometimes adapting his thought on slaves and owners to apply to workers and owners. I have done this not only for dramatic effect but also to show the plausibility (and what more can one demand of a novelist?) of the views I have ascribed to him in the changed circumstances I have envisioned here.