Blood and Iron (44 page)

People were looking at him: people on the sidewalk, people in motorcars, even a couple of men who stopped painting a sign to stare. They were all white. Cincinnati had some Negroes; Cincinnatus knew as much. But he saw none on the streets. That was a change, a jolting change, from the way things were back in Covington, over on the other side of the river.

A fat, red-faced policeman held up his hand. Cincinnatus stopped in front of him, as he should have done. He was very pleased at how well the spavined old Duryea was behaving. He’d spent a lot of time getting the truck into the best shape he could, but the only thing that would really have cured its multifarious ills was a new truck, and he knew it.

The expression of distaste on the cop’s face was broad enough for him and the truck both. The fellow jerked a thumb toward the curb. “Pull over that wagon,” he said in gutturally accented English. “I will with you speak.”

“Is he a foreigner, Pa?” Achilles asked excitedly. “He talks funny, like you said.”

“Reckon he might be,” Cincinnatus answered. “They do say Cincinnati’s chock full of Germans.”

“Real live Germans?” Achilles’eyes were enormous. The USA’s European allies were folk to conjure with, just as Frenchmen had been in the CSA…until the war came, and France lost.

When Cincinnatus stopped the truck by the curb, the policeman strutted over. “You are from where?” he demanded.

“Covington, Kentucky, suh—just the other side of the river,” Cincinnatus answered. He wouldn’t have got uppity with a Covington cop, and he wasn’t so rash as to think the police would be much friendlier on the north side of the Ohio.

“What do you do here?” the policeman asked. “Why don’t you stay on the other side of the river where you belong?”

“I ain’t plannin’ on settling down in Cincinnati, suh,” Cincinnatus said hastily. “My family and me, we’re just passin’ through.”

“Where are you going to?” the policeman inquired.

“Headin’ for Iowa,” Cincinnatus told him. “Des Moines, Iowa.”

“This is a good long way from Cincinnati,” the cop said, as much to himself as to Cincinnatus. “You will the worry of the people in Iowa be, not the worry of the people here. Very well. You may go on.” He even condescended to stop traffic and let Cincinnatus pull out once more. Cincinnatus would have been more grateful had it been less obvious that the policeman was getting rid of him.

“Welcome to the United States,” Elizabeth remarked. “Welcome—but not very welcome.”

“I was thinking that myself, not very long ago,” Cincinnatus said. “Better here than if we’d headed down to Tennessee.”

His wife didn’t argue about that. He went back to concentrating on his driving. He knew where he was going, but he wasn’t completely sure how to get there. Road maps left a lot to be desired. He’d studied as many as he could at the Covington library, so he knew how far from perfect they were. He also mistrusted road signs. Oh, roads in towns had names and numbers; he could rely on that. But he’d seen during the war that roads between towns might change names without warning or might never have had names in the first place. That made traveling more interesting for strangers.

He managed to get out of Cincinnati, and congratulated himself on that. Only after he’d been out of town for a while did he realize he was going due north, not northwest toward Indianapolis.

“Don’t fret yourself about it none,” Elizabeth said when he cursed himself for fourteen different kinds of a fool. “Sooner or later, you’ll come across a road that runs into the one you should have used. Then everything’ll be fine again.”

“Sure, I’ll come across that blame road,” Cincinnatus snarled, “but how the devil will I know it’s the right one? It won’t look no different than any other road, and it won’t have no sign on it, neither.” He felt harassed.

He felt even more harassed a couple of minutes later, when one of the truck’s inner tubes blew out with a bang that would have put him in mind of a gunshot had he not heard more gunshots than he’d ever wanted to hear the past few years. He guided the limping machine to the side of the road and began the slow, dirty business of repairing the puncture.

Motorcars and trucks kept rolling past him as if he weren’t there. Every one of them—every one he noticed, anyhow—had a white face behind the wheel. Most, no doubt, wouldn’t have stopped to help a white man, either. But would all of them have sped past a strange white without more than a single hasty glance? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe not, too.

At last, when he was wrestling the wheel back onto the axle, a Ford did pull up behind the truck. “Give you a hand?” asked the driver, a plump blond fellow in a straw hat and overalls.

“Just about done it now,” Cincinnatus said. “Wish you’d come by a half hour ago; I don’t mind tellin’ you that.”

“Believe it,” the white man said. “Where you bound for?”

“Des Moines,” Cincinnatus answered, and held up a filthy hand. “Yeah, I know I’m on the wrong road. I missed the right one down in Cincinnati. You know how I can get back to it from here?”

“Go up…lemme see…four crossings and then turn left. That’ll put you heading toward the highway to Indiana,” the white man said. He cocked his head to one side. “You got family in Des Moines?”

“No, suh,” Cincinnatus said. “Just lookin’ for a better place to live than Kentucky.” He waited to see how the white man would take that.

“Oh. Good luck.” The fellow climbed into his automobile and drove away.

“Thanks for the directions,” Cincinnatus called after him. He couldn’t tell whether the white man heard. He shrugged. The man had stopped, and had given him some help. He couldn’t complain about that—even if, worn as he was, he felt sorely tempted. “Des Moines,” he said. He’d be on the road again soon.

“Come on,” Sylvia Enos said impatiently to George, Jr., and Mary Jane as they made their way across the Boston Common toward the New State House. “And hold on to my hands, for heaven’s sake. If you get lost, how will I find you again in this crowd?”

U.S. flags fluttered from the platform that had gone up in front of the New State House. Red-white-and-blue bunting wreathed it. Although President Roosevelt wasn’t scheduled to start speaking for another hour, the crowd was already growing rapidly. Most of the people gathering around the platform were men. Why not? They enjoyed the right to vote.

Even though Sylvia didn’t, she wanted to hear what Roosevelt had to say for himself. She wanted to see him, too, and to have the children see him. They’d remember that for the rest of their lives.

Mary Jane, at the moment, had her mind on other things: “The dome sure is shiny, Ma!” she said, pointing. “It’s as shiny as the sun, I bet.”

“That’s because it’s gilded, silly,” George, Jr., said importantly.

“What’s
gilded
mean, Ma?” Mary Jane asked.

“It means
painted with gold paint
,” her big brother told her.

“I didn’t ask you, Mr. Know-It-All,” Mary Jane said. “Besides, I bet you’re making it up, anyway.”

“I am not!” George, Jr., howled. “I ought to pop you a good one, is what I ought to do.”

“I’ll pop both of you if you don’t behave yourselves,” Sylvia said. What ran through her mind was that she’d remember this day for the rest of her life, but not because she’d seen the president.

“You tell Mary Jane that I do so know what
gilded
means,” George, Jr., said. “I learned it in school. And there’s a wooden codfish inside there somewhere, and it’s gilded, too. They call it the Sacred Cod.” He frowned. “I don’t know what
sacred
means.”

“It means
holy
,” Sylvia said. “And your brother’s right, Mary Jane.
Gilded
does mean
painted with gold paint
. And I’ll thank you not to call him names. You’re supposed to know better than that.”

“All right, Ma,” Mary Jane said in tones of such angelic sweetness, Sylvia didn’t believe a word of it. The face Mary Jane made at George, Jr., a moment later said her skepticism had been well founded.

Sylvia worked her way as close to the platform as she could. It wasn’t close enough to satisfy her children, who set up a chorus of, “We can’t see!”

At the moment, there wasn’t anything to see. Sylvia pointed that out, but it did nothing to stem the chorus. She finally said, “When the president starts to speak, I’ll pick both of you up so you can see him, all right?”

“Will you pick both of us up at the same time?” Mary Jane sounded as if she liked the idea.

“No!” Sylvia exclaimed. “If I do that, you and your brother can pick me up afterwards and carry me home.” She thought that might calm them down. Instead, it got them jumping around with excitement. George, Jr., did try to pick her up, and kept trying till she had to smack him to get him to quit.

After what seemed like forever, people started coming out of the New State House and going up onto the platform. They had the same look to them: plump men, middle-aged and elderly, many with big drooping mustaches, all of them in somber black suits with waistcoats. Most wore top hats; a few of the younger ones contented themselves with homburgs. They might have been rich undertakers. In fact, they were Democratic politicians.

They buried more men in the Great War than undertakers could in a hundred years,
Sylvia thought bitterly. One of them stepped forward. “Hurrah for Governor Coolidge!” somebody shouted, which told her who the fellow was.

“You didn’t come here to listen to me today,” Coolidge said. “I’m going to step aside for President Roosevelt.” With a bow, he did just that. “Mr. President!”

“Thank you, Governor Coolidge.” Theodore Roosevelt matched the rest of the men up there in age and build and dress, but he had enough energy for four of them, maybe six. He bounded to the front of the platform, almost running over the governor of Massachusetts in his eagerness to put himself in the public eye. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried in a huge voice, “this is the greatest nation in the history of the world, and I am the luckiest man in the history of the world, to have had the privilege of leading her for the past eight years.”

“No third term! No third term!” The cry broke out in several places around Sylvia at the same time. She suspected that was not an accident. She also suspected Roosevelt would be hearing the same cry everywhere he went up till election day.

He must have suspected the same thing. He bared his mouthful of large, square teeth and growled, “Ah, the Socialists are barking already. If they’d had their way, we would have sat on the sidelines while the greatest struggle the world has ever known was decided without us. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that a great nation does not let others choose its destiny for it. A great nation makes its own fate: that is the mark of greatness.”

He got a round of applause. But the hecklers sent up another chant: “How many dead? How many dead?” That one hit Sylvia hard. Had Roosevelt sat on the sidelines, her husband would have been alive today. Maybe the USA wouldn’t have been so strong. Sylvia would have made that trade in a heartbeat, if only she could have, if only someone would have asked her.

“How many would have died had we waited?” Roosevelt returned. “How many would have died if we’d let England and France and Russia and the Confederate States gang up on our allies? After the Entente powers beat down our friend Kaiser Bill, how long do you think it would have been before our turn came around again? They piled onto us in the War of Secession, didn’t they? They piled onto us in the Second Mexican War, didn’t they? Don’t you think they would have piled onto us in the Great War, too? By jingo, I do! We’re young and virile and up-and-coming, just like the German Empire. The countries that had the power didn’t care to share it with the countries that wanted it, the countries that deserved it. Well, if they wouldn’t yield us a place in the sun, we had to go and take one. And we did. And I’m proud that we did. And if you’re proud, too, you’ll vote the Democratic ticket in November.”

That earned him more applause, with only a thin scattering of boos mixed in.
How many dead?
still echoed inside Sylvia Enos as she lifted first her son and then her daughter to see Theodore Roosevelt. The president was a master of the big picture; he made her see the whole world turning in her hands. But that still counted for less with her than a husband who had not come home.

And the hecklers hadn’t given up, either. “No third term!” they called again. “No third term!”

Roosevelt stuck out his chin. The sun flashed from the lenses of his spectacles, making him look as much like a mechanism as a man. “Because George Washington decided he would not seek a third term, is it Holy Writ that every succeeding president must follow suit?” he thundered. “We are speaking of the United States of America here, ladies and gentlemen, not a hand of auction bridge.” He pounded fist into palm. “I refuse to reckon my actions bound by those of a slaveholding Virginian a hundred and twenty years dead. Vote for me or against me, according to whether you think well or ill of me and what I have done in office. This other pernicious nonsense has no place in the campaign.”

“Four more years! Four more years!” Roosevelt had friends in the crowd, too: many more friends than foes, by the number of voices urging a third term for the president. With so much support, Sylvia didn’t see how he could fail to be reelected. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He probably wouldn’t find any excuse to start a new war between now and 1924.

“Capitalist tool! Capitalist tool!” The Socialists started a new jeer.

Roosevelt had been talking about the vote for women, which, rather to Sylvia’s surprise, he professed to favor. “I am the tool of no man!” he shouted, meeting the hecklers as combatively as he had throughout the speech. “I am the tool of no man, and I am the tool of no class. Let me hear Mr. Sinclair say the same thing, and I will have learned something. A dictatorship of the proletariat is no less a dictatorship than any other sort.”

George, Jr., tugged at Sylvia’s skirt. “What’s the pro—prole—prolewatchamacallit, Ma?”

“Proletariat. It means the people who do all the work in factories and on farms,” Sylvia answered. “Not the rich people who own the factories.”