"My Lord," Jeff whispered. He'd had hope machine-gunned with the pink slip in his pay envelope. Now, suddenly, it lived again. Tears stung his eyes. "God bless you, sir. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart."
Caleb Briggs waved that aside. "Don't you worry about it, Pinkard. Don't you worry one little bit. This here is the Freedom Party, remember. We aren't the Whigs or the Radical Liberals. We take care of our own. You've been a good Party man for a long time. We owe you for that, and we pay our debts. We pay 'em to our enemies, and we pay 'em to our friends."
"I'll see this Griffith fellow first thing in the morning," Jeff said. With the chance of work ahead of him, he felt like a new man. And the new man was every bit as loyal to the Freedom Party as the old one had been. "This is the best outfit in the world!" he exulted.
Briggs smiled and nodded. "Damn right it is."
AmericanEmpire: TheCenterCannotHold
XI
H ipolito Rodriguez had never thought about what a stock-market crash could do to the town of Baroyeca, and to the silver mine in the hills on which the town depended for its existence. Just because he hadn't thought about such things, though, didn't mean they weren't real. The mine shut down in September. A few days later, the railroad stopped coming into Baroyeca.
"A good thing we got the stove when we did," his wife said when he brought that news home. "It would take a lot longer to come here now."
" Si, Magdalena," he said. "Everything will take a lot longer to come here now. The town is liable to dry up and blow away, and then what will become of the farms all around it?"
"We go on and do as we always did," Magdalena answered. "We stay on our land and mind our own business."
"But we can't make everything here," Rodriguez said. "If the general store closes, life will get very hard."
"How can the general store close?" Magdalena said. "Everyone around here goes to it. Senor Diaz is a rich man."
"How rich will he be if he has to ship everything into Baroyeca by wagon or by truck?" Rodriguez asked. "I don't know how much that costs, but I know it costs a lot more than the railroad."
"Now you worry me," Magdalena said. "I think you did that on purpose."
"As a matter of fact, yes," he replied. "I'm worried myself. I didn't want to be the only one."
"Oh." She'd been making tortillas. After rubbing cornmeal off her hands and onto her apron, she gave Hipolito Rodriguez a hug. "Who would have thought it could be this bad?"
"Who, indeed?" he answered. "Up till now, we complained that things that happened in Richmond didn't matter one way or the other here in Sonora, and that nobody back there cared about us." His laugh rang bitter. "Now things that happened in Richmond and in New York City matter very much here, and Madre de Dios! but I wish they didn't."
Magdalena nodded. "How do these things work out like this? You go to the meetings of the Partido de la Libertad -what do they say there? Do they know? Can they make it better?"
"What can they do now?" he asked in return. "The president is a Whig. Most of the Senators and Congressmen are Whigs. The Freedom Party can only protest what the Whigs do, and the Whigs don't do much. They don't seem to know what to do. They are fools." He'd always thought the Whigs were fools. Even before Sonora started electing men from the Freedom Party to Congress, the state had sent Radical Liberals off to Richmond.
"If the Freedom Party had power, what would it do?" Magdalena asked.
"Put people to work," Rodriguez answered at once. "Make sure they stayed at work. Make the country strong again. Tell the United States to leave us alone, and be strong enough to make sure the United States did it. Take back the states the USA stole from us in the war."
The only time he'd ever seen men from the United States was during his service in the Confederate Army during the Great War. The soldiers from the USA had done their best to kill him, and had come alarmingly close more than once. A lot of the west-Texas prairie where he'd fought was now included in the U.S. state of Houston. It was as if the USA were mocking all his effort, all his courage-yes, and all his fear, too. Anything he could do to pay back the United States of America, he would do, and do gladly.
Nodding-she knew how he felt-Magdalena said, "These things sound wonderful. How will the Freedom Party make them happen?"
"Why…" He hesitated, then shrugged. "I don't know, not exactly," he admitted. "I don't think anyone knows. But I do know they will work hard and try everything. And I know they have no hope of helping the country if they aren't in power. The Whigs have made too many mistakes. It's time for them to go."
Robert Quinn, the Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, had said that very thing in his accented Spanish. Hipolito Rodriguez didn't mind that he spoke the language like a man whose first language was English. That Quinn spoke Spanish at all mattered to the farmer. It told him the Freedom Party was serious about winning followers in Baroyeca, in all of Sonora. The Whigs never had been. Even the Radical Liberals had worried about the big men, the rich men, first, and had expected them to bring the campesinos into line. It had worked for many years, too. But no more.
"When you vote Freedom, you know the Party cares," Rodriguez said. "Nobody else does, not like that."
"But the election is still more than a month away," Magdalena said. "What can the Party do in the meantime? What can anyone do if-the Blessed Virgin forbid it!-the general store closes its doors?" She crossed herself.
"I don't know," Rodriguez answered. "I don't think anyone knows."
"As long as we have enough water to keep the corn and beans growing and the livestock healthy, we can go on," his wife said. "Life may be hard, but life has been hard before. We will get through till it is better again."
"I hope so," Rodriguez said. He'd got used to being a fairly prosperous farmer-prosperous by the standards of southern Sonora, at any rate. He'd seen just enough of the rest of the Confederate States to have a suspicion bordering on certainty that prosperity here was something less than it might have been elsewhere in the country.
As a measure of that prosperity, Magdalena had a treadle-powered sewing machine. She'd bought it secondhand, from a woman in Baroyeca who'd got a better machine, but even secondhand it was a status symbol for a farmer's wife. It also let her get more work done faster than she could have managed without it. With six children to be clothed, that was no small matter.
A few days after Rodriguez came back from Baroyeca, the needle in the sewing machine broke. Like any farmer, he was a good handyman. Fixing anything that small and precisely made, though, was beyond him. "You have to go back into town," Magdalena told him. "I have half a dozen pairs of pants to make. You don't want the boys to run around naked, do you?"
"I'll go," he said. "Give me the broken needle, so I can be sure I'm getting the matching part. There are as many different kinds as there are different sewing machines, and you would have something to say to me if I brought back the wrong one, now wouldn't you?"
"Maybe not," his wife answered. "Maybe I'd just think you'd spent too much time in La Culebra Verde before you tried to buy the right one."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Rodriguez said with dignity. Magdalena laughed so raucously, she distracted Miguel and Jorge enough to make them stop wrestling for a little while.
With that laughter still ringing in his ears, Hipolito Rodriguez set out for Baroyeca the next morning. When he got there, he made sure he bought the sewing-machine needle first. Magdalena would never have let him live it down if, after all his care, he came back with the wrong one.