American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

friends?” Mary Jane considered, then shrugged. Joe Kennedy said, “Come on, Mrs. Enos. My motorcar’s out in front of the building. People are looking forward to hearing you; they really are.” That still astonished Sylvia. So did Kennedy’s motorcar. She’d expected a plain black Ford, the kind most people drove. But he had an enormous Oldsmobile roadster, painted fire-engine red. He drove as if he owned the only car on the street, too, which in Boston was an invitation to suicide. Somehow, he reached the Democratic Party hall unscathed. Sylvia discovered a belief in miracles.
      “Here she is, ladies and gentlemen!” Kennedy introduced her as if she were a vaudeville star. “The brave lady you’ve been waiting for, Sylvia Enos!”
      Looking out at that sea of faces frightened Sylvia. The wave of applause frightened and warmed her at the same time. She stammered a little at first, but gained fluency as she explained what she’d done in South Carolina, and why. She’d told the story before; it got easier each time. She finished, “If we forgetabout the war, try to pretend it never happened, what did we really win? Nothing!” The applause that came then rang louder still.
     

    II
      J ake Featherston drummed his fingers on his desk. Spring was in the air in Richmond; the trees were putting on new leaves, while birdsong gladdened every ear. Or almost every ear—it did very little for Featherston. He’d led a battery of three-inch guns during the war, and much preferred their bellowing to the sweet notes of catbird and sparrow. When the guns roared, at least a man knew he was in a fight.
      “And we are, God damn it,” Featherston muttered. The leader of the Freedom Party was a lanky man in his mid-thirties, with cheekbones and chin thrusting up under the flesh of his face like rocks under a thin coat of soil on some farm that would always yield more trouble than crops. His eyes . . . Some people were drawn to them, while others flinched away. He knew that. He didn’t quite understand it, but he knew it and used it. I always mean what I say,  he told himself. And that shows. With all the lying sons of bitches running around loose, you’d better believe it shows.
      If he looked out his window, he could see Capitol Square, and the Confederate Capitol in it. His lip curled in fine contempt. If that wasn’t the home of some of the biggest, lyingest sons of bitches in the whole wide world . . . “If it isn’t, then I’m a nigger,” Featherston declared. He talked to himself a fair amount, hardly noticing he was doing it. More than three years of serving a gun had taken a good deal of his hearing. People who didn’t care for him claimed he was selectively deaf. They had a point, too, though he wasn’t about to admit it.
      The Capitol shared the square with a large equestrian statue of George Washington—who, being a Virginian, was much more revered in the CSA than in the USA these days—and an even larger one of Albert Sidney Johnston, hero and martyr during the War of Secession. Somewhere between one of those statues and the other, Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA almost ten years before.
      “We should’ve licked those Yankee bastards,” Featherston said, as if somebody’d claimed otherwise.
      “If the niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back, we would’ve licked those Yankee bastards.” He believed it with every fiber of his being.
        And if that jackass down in Birmingham hadn’t blown out President Hampton’s stinking brains, what there were of them, the Party’d be well on its way towards putting this country back on its feet again.  Jake slammed a scarred, callused fist down on the desk. Papers jumped. I was so close, dammit.  He’d come within a whisker—well, two whiskers—of winning the presidential election in 1921.
      Looking toward 1927, he’d seen nothing but smooth sailing ahead.
      Of course, one of the reasons the Freedom Party had