"I'm sure he meant it as an insult, but I'll take it for a compliment," Anne said. "Last chance, Mr. Wiggins-who told you that?"
"Jake Featherston."
Anne had expected almost any other name than that of the Freedom Party leader. Something she didn't want to call alarm shot through her. She took Jake Featherston very seriously. That didn't mean she wanted anything to do with him. She'd backed him for a while, yes, but she backed winners, and he didn't look like one any more. Trying to gain time to recover her composure, she asked, "If you used to work for the Whigs, why are you calling me for Featherston now?"
"On account of what I saw when I went to Philadelphia, ma'am," he replied. "The United States don't respect you when you're weak. If you're down, they'll kick you. But if you're strong, they have got to sit up and take notice. That's a fact."
"I agree with that. I think everyone in the Confederate States agrees with that," Anne said.
"Well, there you are," Wiggins said cheerily. "If you agree with that, the Freedom Party is really and truly the only place for you, because-"
"Nonsense." Anne didn't care about his reasons. She had reasons of her own: "The Freedom Party has about as much chance of electing the next president as I do of getting elected myself. I have no intention of giving Jake Featherston one more dime. Every since that madman of a Grady Calkins murdered President Hampton, it'd take a special miracle for anyone from the Freedom Party to get himself elected dog catcher, let alone anything more. I don't spend my money where it does me no good."
"I don't think the clouds are as black as you say, ma'am," Wiggins replied. "Yes, we lost a couple of seats in the election last November, but not as many as people said we would. We'll be back-you wait and see if we aren't. Folks don't have much in the way of memory-and besides, ma'am, we're right."
"If you can't win an election, whether you're right or not doesn't matter," Anne pointed out.
"We will." Wiggins sounded confident. She got the idea he sounded confident all the time. He went on, "I want to say a couple of other things, and then I'm through. First one is, Mr. Featherston, he knows who's for him, and he knows who's against him, and he never, ever, forgets the one or the other."
He was, without question, right about that. Featherston was as relentless as a barrel smashing through one line of trenches after another. Anne didn't intimidate easily, but Jake Featherston had done the job. That just gave her more reason to harden her voice and say, "I'll take my chances."
Edward C.L. Wiggins chuckled. "He told me you were near as stubborn as he is himself, and I see he's right. One more thing, and then I'm through, and I won't trouble you any more."
"Go ahead," Anne said. "Make it short." I've already wasted more than enough time on you.
"Yes, ma'am. Here's what I've got to say: there's only one party in the CSA that's got any notion at all about what the devil to do about the nigger problem in this country, and that's the Freedom Party. And now I'm done. Good-bye." He surprised her by hanging up.
Slowly, she put the mouthpiece back on its hook and set down the telephone. She said a word she was unlikely to use in public, one that would have made strong men gasp and women of delicate sensibilities blush and faint. Wiggins had known how to get through to her, after all. No one was likely to forget the Red Negro uprising that had tied the Confederacy in knots late in 1915 and early in 1916. No one knew how much it had helped the USA win the war, but it couldn't have hurt. The Freedom Party stood foursquare for vengeance, and so did Anne Colleton.
And why not? she thought. One brother dead, my plantation wrecked, me almost murdered… Oh, yes, I owe those black bastards just a little. The whole country owes them just a little, whether the Whigs and the Radical Liberals want to admit it or not.
She repeated that word, louder this time. Behind her, her surviving brother burst out laughing. She whirled around. "Confound it, Tom," she said angrily, "I didn't know you were there."
Tom Colleton laughed harder than ever. "I'll bet you didn't," he answered. "If you had, you would have said something like, 'Confound it,' instead." He was a couple of years younger than Anne, and a little darker, with hair light brown rather than gold. He'd gone into the war an irresponsible boy and come out of it a lieutenant-colonel and a man, something of which Anne still had to remind herself now and again.
She shrugged now. "I probably would have. But I meant what I did say."
"Who was on the telephone?" he asked.
"A man named Edward C.L. Wiggins," Anne replied. "He wanted money from us for the Freedom Party."
Tom frowned. "Those people don't take no for an answer, do they?"
"They never have," Anne said. "It's their greatest strength-and their greatest weakness."
"Did you find out why he travels with a herd of initials?" her brother asked. She shook her head. Tom went on, "What did you tell him?"
"No, of course," Anne answered. "The way things are now, I'd sooner cozy up to a cottonmouth than to Jake Featherston."
"Don't blame you a bit," Tom Colleton said. "He's an impressive man in a lot of ways, but…" He shook his head. "He puts me in mind of a time bomb, wound up and waiting to go off. And when he does, I don't think it'll be pretty."
"There were times when I thought he had all the answers," Anne said. "And there were times when I thought he was a little bit crazy. And there were times when I thought both those things at once. Those were the ones that scared me."
"Scared me, too," Tom agreed, "and we don't scare easy."
"No. We'd be dead by now if we did," Anne said, and Tom nodded. She eyed him. "And speaking of looking pretty, you're fancier than you need to be for staying around here. Is that a necktie?" She thought its gaudy stripes of crimson and gold excessive, but declined to criticize.
Her brother nodded again. "Sure is. Bought it from what's-his-name, the Jew tailor. And I'm going to pay a call on Bertha Talmadge in a little while."
Before the war, Anne would have discouraged such a call-with a bludgeon, if necessary. The Muncies, Bertha's parents, were grocers, and their daughter no fit match for a planter's son. These days… Well, grocers never starved. And Bertha Talmadge, though a widow whose husband, like so many others, had died in the trenches, was reasonably young, reasonably pretty, reasonably bright.
Anne nodded approval. "Have a nice time. You should find yourself a wife, settle down, have yourself some children."
He didn't get angry at her, as he would have before the war. In fact, he nodded again himself. "You're right. I should. And, as a matter of fact, so should you."
"That's different," Anne said quickly.
"How?"
Because he was her brother, she told him: "Because my husband would want to try to run everything, because that's what men do. And odds are he wouldn't be as good at it as I am. That's why."
"And even if he was, you wouldn't admit it," Tom said.
That was also true. Anne Colleton, however, had not the slightest intention of admitting it. Giving her brother her most enigmatic smile, she went back to the Wall Street Journal.
M ary McGregor was only thirteen years old, but her course in life was already set. So she told herself, anyhow, and also told her mother and her older sister as they sat down to supper on their farm outside Rosenfeld, Manitoba: "The Yankees killed my brother. They killed my father, too. But I'm going to get even-you see if I don't."
Fright showed on her mother's careworn face. Maude McGregor touched the sleeve of her woolen blouse to show Mary she still wore mourning black. "You be careful," she said. "If anything happened to you after Alexander and Arthur, I don't think I could bear it."