Tom Kennedy had known he could read and write, too. Kennedy had also used that to his advantage. But with him, there had always been something of the flavor of a man using a high-school horse. It wasn't there with Straubing. Cincinnatus'ear for such things was keen. Had it been there, he would have heard it.
Before long, blacks from the wharves were loading crates into the back of Cincinnatus' truck. They weren't from his labor gang, but he knew several of them even so. They looked at him from the corners of their eyes. Nobody said anything, not with white men all around: most of the other truck drivers were white, for instance. Cincinnatus waited to see how that would go.
The trucks rumbled out of Covington before nine o'clock. The front was between Lexington and Richmond, Kentucky: about a four-hour trip. A little more than halfway there, they rolled past the Corinth Monument, which commemorated Braxton Bragg's victory in late 1862 that had brought Kentucky into the Confederacy. Bragg's statue was gone from its pedestal these days, and the pedestal itself plastered over with fresh, crisp three-eagles posters. The USA aimed to keep as much of Kentucky as it had seized.
Laborers, mostly black but some white, unloaded the trucks. Some of what those had brought would go to the front in small wagons, some on muleback or on man's back. Cincinnatus ate his dinner out of the dinner pail, then drove the truck back to Covington. Everyone took him for granted. He still had trouble knowing what to make of that.
He got back into Covington with his headlamps on. Straubing paid off the drivers himself. Some got $1.50, some $1.75, some two dollars even. One of the two-dollar men was black. Nobody raised a fuss.
Money jingling in his pocket, Cincinnatus headed for home with more news for Elizabeth than he could shake a stick at. He went past Conroy's general store, as he always did when coming home from the riverfront. Conroy had a paper stuck in the bottom left-hand corner of his window. That meant he and Tom Kennedy wanted to see Cincinnatus.
"Well, I'll be damned if I want to see them," Cincinnatus muttered. "Paper? What paper? I didn't see no paper." He walked right past the general store.
Three eagles glared out at Flora Hamburger from every other wall as she walked to the Socialist Party offices. She glared right back at them. She was sick to death of wartime propaganda. What worried her most was that the Democrats were getting better at what she'd thought of as a Socialist specialty.
Other posters (some with text in Yiddish as well as English; the government didn't miss a trick) exhorted people to buy the latest series of Victory Bonds, to use less coal than their legal ration (which was, most of the time, not big enough as it was), to take the train as little as they could (which also saved coal), to turn back glass bottles and tin cans, to give waste grease to the War Department through their local butcher shop, to…she lost track of everything. Anyone who tried to do all the things the posters urged him to do would go mad in short order.
But then, the world already seemed to have gone mad.
Here and there, among the eagles and the handsome men in green-gray and the women who had to be their wives or mothers, Socialist Party posters managed to find space. Keeping them up there wasn't easy. As fast as boys went round with pastepots and brushes, Soldiers' Circle men followed, tearing down anything that might contradict what TR wanted people to think today.
PEACE AND JUSTICE, one of the Socialist posters said. A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE WORKER, shouted another. A good many copies of that one stayed up; some of the Soldiers' Circle goons took it for a government-issued poster. Stealing the opposition's slogan was always a good idea.
Fewer Soldiers' Circle men prowled the Centre Market than was usually so. And, most uncommonly, none loitered in front of Max Fleischmann's butcher shop. Fleischmann was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shop when Flora came up. "Good morning, my dear," he said with Old World courtliness. He was a Democrat himself, which didn't keep the government goons from giving him a hard time. With his shop right under Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party headquarters, it was guilt by association in the most literal sense of the words.
"Good morning, Mr. Fleischmann," Flora answered. "How are you today?"
"Today, not so bad," the butcher answered. "Last night-" He rolled his eyes. "You've seen the 'turn in old grease' posters?" After pausing to see if Flora would nod, he went on, "Last night, just as I was closing up shop, one of those Soldiers' Circle mamzrim brought in a gallon tin-of lard."
"Oy!" Flora exclaimed. That was more nastily clever than the Soldiers' Circle usually managed to be. A gallon of pig's fat in a kosher butcher shop…
"Oy is right," Fleischmann agreed mournfully. "Thank God I had no customers just then. I shut the shop and brought my rabbi over. The place is ritually clean again, but even so-"
"I can complain to the City Council about that kind of harassment, if you'd like me to," Flora said.
But the butcher shook his head. "Better not. If one of them does it one time, a kholeriyeh on him and life goes on. If you give the idea to a whole great lot of them, it will happen over and over for the next six months. No, better not."
"It shouldn't be like that," Flora said. But she'd spent enough time as an activist to know the difference between what should have been and what was. Shaking her head in sad sympathy with Max Fleischmann, she went upstairs.
People were still coming into the Socialist Party offices, which meant the chaos wasn't so bad as it would be later in the day. She had time to get a glass of tea, pour sugar into it, and catch up on a little paperwork before the telephones started going mad.
"How are you this morning?" Maria Tresca asked.
"I've been worse-little Yossel slept through the whole night," Flora answered. "But I've been better, too." She explained what the Soldiers' Circle man had done to Max Fleischmann.
Maria was Catholic, but she'd spent enough time among Jews to understand what lard in the butcher shop meant. "It's an outrage," she snapped. "And he probably went out to a saloon and got drunk afterwards, laughing about it."
"Probably just what he did," Flora agreed. "Anyone who could think of anything so vile, he should walk in front of a train."
Herman Bruck walked in just then. Flora wished fleetingly that he would walk in front of a train, too. But no, that wasn't fair. Yes, Herman was a nuisance and wouldn't leave her in peace. But he'd never yet made her snatch a hatpin out from among the artificial flowers where it lurked, and she didn't think he ever would. There were nuisances, but then there were nuisances.
"Good morning, Flora," he said, setting his homburg on the hat tree. "You look pretty today-you must have had a good night's sleep."
"Yes, thanks," she answered shortly. She wasn't going to tell him about little Yossel. She didn't encourage him-but then, he needed no encouragement.
He'd got himself some tea and sat down at his desk when a Western Union messenger opened the door to the office. Flora thought about the messenger who'd brought word of little Yossel's father's death back to Sophie at the apartment the family shared. She shook her head, annoyed at herself. That wouldn't happen here. People didn't live here, however much it sometimes seemed they did.
She accepted the yellow envelope, gave the delivery boy a nickel, and watched him head back down to the street. "Who is it from?" Herman Bruck asked.
"It's from Philadelphia," she answered, and tore the envelope open. Her eyes slid rapidly over the words there. She had to read them twice before she believed them. No one would bring bad news here. The thought jeered in her mind. "It's Congressman Zuckerman," she said in a voice so empty, she hardly recognized it as her own. "He was walking downstairs with Congressman Potts from Brooklyn, and, and, he tripped and he fell and, he, he broke his neck. He died not quite three hours ago."