“We’d better find out.” Foster Stearns and three other committee members said that or something very much like it. Stearns added, “We don’t even have to adjourn, because we never convened. Come on!” They all hurried toward the entrance.
“Has Senator Taft come in?” Flora asked the butch policewoman.
“Not by this way,” she answered, and he would have.
Flora and the rest of the committee members looked at one another, their consternation growing. Somebody said, “Maybe we’d better start calling hospitals. Philadelphia Methodist is closest to where the bomb went off, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Foster Stearns said while Flora was still forming the picture in her mind. He nodded to the policewoman. “Where’s the nearest telephone we can use?”
“Down that hallway, sir, on the left-hand side.” She pointed. She was more polite to him than she had been to Flora. With a wave of thanks, Stearns trotted off.
Along with the other committee members, Flora followed him. Maybe there would be more than one telephone, so they could call several hospitals at once. And even if there weren’t, they would hear the news as soon as he got it.
He was already talking when Flora came up. “You do have casualties there?” he asked. “How many? Have any gone to other hospitals, too?” To the other Representatives and Senators, he said, “At least a couple of dozen. It’s a bad one.” He spoke into the handset again: “Is Senator Taft there?…He is? How is he? This is Congressman Stearns. I’m on a committee with him.” He waited. Someone spoke into his ear. Flora knew the answer right away-he looked as if the person on the other end of the line had punched him in the stomach. “Thank you, Miss.” He hung up the telephone like a man moving in the grip of a bad dream.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Flora said.
“He is.” Stearns nodded dazedly. “Massive internal injuries, she said. They did everything they could, but…” He spread his hands.
“Do they know who the bomber was?” Two or three people asked the same question.
Now Stearns shook his head. “Only pieces left. The woman at the hospital said it was a man. Maybe what he’s got in his pockets will tell them more-or maybe it won’t.”
Something flashed through Flora’s mind. A story she’d read to Joshua, back when he cared about stories and not Springfields. “Pocketses,” she muttered, but the memory wouldn’t take any more shape than that. “Whoever did it, he hurt us when he did. Robert was a good friend to his friends, and a bad enemy to his enemies.”
“He was a stiff-necked old grouch,” she heard one of her fellow Socialists whisper to another.
That was also true; no one who’d ever had much to do with Robert Taft would or could deny it. Taft had no patience for people who didn’t measure up to his own stern notions of rectitude. Despite wide political differences, he and Flora had got on well for years. Beyond any doubt, that said something about her. They made odd friends, the austere Ohio aristocrat and the New York garment worker’s daughter, odd but good.
And now they didn’t. I’ll have to go to the funeral, she thought. She had a black dress that was getting too much wear these days. Part of that was the war’s fault, part her own for reaching her fifties. No matter how often you told them not to, people kept dying on you.
“I think,” Congressman Stearns said, “we’d better go back and let some unhappy Army officers know we’re adjourning.”
Going on the way Taft wanted would have meant convening the committee and raking those bungling officers over the coals. Flora was sure of that. She was just as sure she had no more heart for it than her colleagues did.
Two of the officers-a brigadier general and a colonel-were in the conference room when the committee members returned. “Good God!” the colonel exclaimed when he heard the news. “He was a son of a bitch-everybody knew that-but he was our son of a bitch, and everybody knew that, too.”
His words more pungently echoed Flora’s. She kept feeling at the hole losing Robert Taft left in her spirit. It seemed as real, and as painful, as the hole from a lost tooth in her mouth. The dentist gave her codeine after doing his worst to her. There was no codeine for a hole in the spirit. It would have to hurt till time turned it from an open, bleeding wound to a scar.
Before she even knew she was doing it, she started to cry. So much already lost in this war. And she thought about Joshua’s latest letter. She’d lost so much-and she still had so much to lose.
Jefferson Pinkard thought Humble, Texas, was mighty well named. It lay twenty miles north of Houston, and was about the size of Snyder-three or four thousand people. For a while after the turn of the century, Humble might have been Proud: they struck oil there, and a lot of people got rich. Then the mad inflation after the Great War wiped out everybody’s money, rich and poor alike, and after that the wells started running dry. Some of them still pumped, but they weren’t making anybody rich these days. Lumber from the pine woods around the town helped business keep going.
Humble would just about do, Jeff decided. He’d looked at a lot of small towns in southeastern Texas, and this one seemed best suited to his purposes. A railroad ran through it; building a spur off the main line would be easy. Local sheriffs and Mexican soldiers had already cleaned most of the Negroes out of the area. If he had to build a new camp here, he could do that.
He’d rather have stayed in Snyder, but that wouldn’t fly much longer. Who would have thought the United States cared enough about Negroes to try to keep the Confederates from getting rid of them? What business of the damnyankees was it? If they wanted to let their blacks live, they could do that. But they didn’t like them well enough to let more from the CSA come over their border.
Jeff could see advantages to starting over. He could do things the right way from the beginning. The bathhouses that weren’t would go up as an organic part of the camp, not as add-ons. He could build a proper crematorium here, get rid of the bodies once and for all, instead of dumping them into trenches. Yes, it could work.
It would disrupt routine, though. To a camp commandant, routine was a precious thing. Routine meant the camp was operating the way it was supposed to. When routine broke down, that was when you had trouble.
Of course, if you looked at it another way, routine at Camp Determination had already broken down. Damnyankee bombing raids and the U.S. Eleventh Army’s drive toward Snyder had ruined it. How could you run a proper camp when you weren’t sure how much population you needed to reduce from one day to the next? How could you when you didn’t know whether soldiers in green-gray would start shelling you soon? That hadn’t happened yet, but Jeff knew it could.
When he talked to the mayor of Humble about running up a camp outside of town, that worthy said, “You’ll use local lumber, won’t you? You’ll use local labor?”
“Well, sure,” Jeff answered. “As much as I can, anyways.”
“Sounds good, General,” the mayor said, eyeing the wreathed stars on either side of the collar on Jeff’s uniform. Pinkard didn’t explain about Freedom Party ranks-life was too short. The mayor went on, “Once you get this place built, reckon you’ll want to keep some local boys on as guards? And some of the older fellas who maybe got hurt the last time around or maybe aren’t up to marching twenty-five miles a day?” The mayor himself, with a big belly, a bald head, and a bushy white mustache, fell into that last group.
“I’ll do what I can,” Jeff said. “If they’ve got what it takes, I’ll use ’em.”
The mayor beamed. He thought Pinkard had made a promise. Jeff beamed, too. He knew damn well he hadn’t. The mayor stuck out his pudgy hand. “Sounds like we got ourselves a deal,” he said.
“I hope so,” Jeff said, shaking on it. “Still have to clear things with Richmond, too, you understand.” If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.