He'd just started his second beer when the door flew open. In came a couple of big men talking English. One of them looked his way, waved, and called, "Freedom!"
"Freedom!" Jeff echoed. "Who the hell are you boys? Where y'all from?"
One of them, a blond, was named Pete Frazee. The other, who sported a fiery red mustache, called himself Charlie MacCaffrey. They sat down by him. Frazee got a beer. MacCaffrey ordered tequila. "How do you drink that stuff?" Pinkard asked him. "Tastes like cigar butts, you ask me."
"Yeah, but it'll get me drunk faster'n that horse piss you and Pete got," MacCaffrey answered. He knocked it back and waved for more.
He was from Jackson, Mississippi; Frazee from the country not far outside of Louisville. The Kentuckian said, "They told me I could've gone back after the war, but I was damned if I wanted to live in the United States. I spent three years tryin' to kill those damnyankees. Screw me if I wanted to be one myself."
"Oh, hell, yes," Pinkard said. "How'd you find out about the Party?"
"Heard one of their people talkin' on a street corner in Chattanooga, where I was at," Frazee answered with a reminiscent smile. "Soon as I did, I decided that was for me. Haven't looked back since." He nudged the fellow who'd come in with him. "How about you, Charlie?"
"I like bustin' heads," MacCaffrey said frankly. "Plenty of heads need bustin' in Mississippi, too. We got as many niggers as white folks, and some o' them bastards even got the vote after they went into the Army. I don't cotton to that-no way, nohow. Whigs and Rad Libs let 'em do it. Soon as I found me a party that didn't like it, I reckoned that was for me."
"How'd you come down here?" Jeff asked.
MacCaffrey made a face. "Ever since that stupid bastard plugged Wade Hampton V, we pulled in our horns like a goddamn snail. Wasn't hardly any fun any more. I still got more ass-kickin' in me than that. How about you?"
Jeff shrugged. "Didn't like what I was doin'. Didn't have nothin' holdin' me in Birmingham. I thought, Why the hell not? — and here I am."
"You're the fellow with the prisoners of war, ain't you?" Pete Frazee said suddenly. Pinkard nodded. So did Frazee, in a thoughtful way. He went on, "Heard about you. From what everybody says, you're doing a hell of a job."
"Thank you. Thank you kindly," Pinkard answered. He paused till the barmaid got him another beer, then chuckled and said, "Wasn't what I came down here to do, but it hasn't worked out too bad."
He spent most of the afternoon drinking with the other Party men and enjoying the chance to speak his own language. Then, despite a certain stagger, he made his way to the brothel and laid down enough silver for a quiet room and the company of a girl named Maria (not that half the women down here weren't named Maria), far and away the prettiest one in the place.
He'd drunk enough to have some trouble rising to the occasion. He'd paid enough to have her slide down the bed and start to help him with her mouth. He enjoyed it for perhaps half a minute. Then he remembered Emily's mouth on him after he'd found her with Bedford Cunningham, who had been his best friend. "No, goddammit," he growled, and pulled away.
"What?" Maria had no idea what the trouble was.
"No, I said." He scrambled onto her. She'd got him hard enough so he could manage. He did, and then got back into his clothes and left in a hurry.
Maria shook her head. "Loco," she muttered, and tapped a finger against her temple.
C larence Potter said, "My trouble is, I want to see the Freedom Party dead and buried, not just weak." He sipped at his whiskey in the Charleston saloon. "That makes me as much a fanatic as Jake Featherston, I suppose."
The Freedom Party was weak nowadays, and weaker in South Carolina than it had been before the previous year's Congressional election. Even so, in most saloons a comment like that would have been good for starting a fight. Not in the Crow's Nest, though, not on a Tuesday night. The Whig Party faithful met at the Odd Fellows' hall across the street, and then a lot of them were in the habit of coming over and hashing things out with the help of the lubricants the saloon provided.
Braxton Donovan was a prominent Charleston lawyer. He was also, at the moment, slightly-but only slightly-drunk. He said, "Only thing that'd put those know-nothing peckerheads into power is a calahamity-a calahamity, I tell you."
"A calamity, you mean?" Potter asked.
"That's what I said, isn't it?" Several of the chins beneath Donovan's neat gray goatee wobbled.
"As a matter of fact, no," Potter answered. Relentless precision had brought him into Confederate Army Intelligence, and later into investigative work.
"Well, it's what I meant-a calahamity is." The lawyer held up his glass. The colored bartender hastened to refill it. Braxton Donovan nodded regally. "Thank you kindly, Ptolemy."
"You're welcome, suh," Ptolemy said, professionally polite, professionally subservient.
"Tell me, Ptolemy," Donovan asked in his rolling baritone, "what is your view of the Freedom Party?" He might have been encouraging a friendly witness on the stand.
"Don't like 'em for hell, suh," Ptolemy said at once. "Somebody should ought to do somethin' about 'em, you wants to know what I thinks." He polished the top of the bar with a spotless white towel.
"This country is in a bad way when some not so small fraction of the electorate can't see what's obvious to a nigger bartender," Braxton Donovan said. He took a pull at his freshened drink. "Still and all, better a not so small fraction than a large fraction, as was so a few years back."
"Yes," Potter agreed. "And I believe Ptolemy here really does have no use for the Freedom Party-it's in his interest not to, after all, when you think about what Featherston has to say about blacks. But even so… Jeb Stuart III had a colored servant whose name, if I remember right, was also Ptolemy. Jake Featherston suspected the fellow was a Red-he was serving under Stuart in the First Richmond Howitzers. He told me about this servant not so long before the uprisings began."
"And so?" Donovan asked. "Your point is?"
"Jeb Stuart III pulled wires with his father to make sure that Ptolemy didn't have any trouble." Clarence Potter finished his whiskey at a gulp. "And he was a Red, dammit, as became abundantly clear when the pot boiled over. Young Stuart died in combat-let himself be killed, they say, so he wouldn't have to face the music. His father's revenge was to make sure Featherston never rose above the rank of sergeant. Petty, I suppose, but understandable."
"Why are you telling me this?" the lawyer asked.
"A couple of reasons," Potter answered. "For one, we can trace the rise of the Freedom Party to such small things. And, for another, a white man's a fool if he takes a Negro's word at face value. Look what happened to Jeb Stuart III." He swung around on the stool so that he faced the bartender. "Ptolemy!"
"Yes, suh? 'Nother drink, suh?" the black man asked.
"In a minute," Potter said. "First, tell me something-what were you doing when the rebellion came in 1915?"
"Me, suh?" For all they showed, Ptolemy's eyes might have been cut from stone. "Nothin', suh. Stayin' home mindin' my business."
"Uh- huh." Potter knew what that meant. It meant the bartender was lying through his teeth. Every Negro in the CSA claimed to have stayed at home minding his own business during the Red rebellion. If all the blacks who said they had actually had stayed at home, there would have been no rebellion in the first place.
Ptolemy said, "Suh, it was a long time ago nowadays, an' it's all over an' done with. Ain't no way to change what happened. Onliest thing we can do is pick up the pieces an' go on."