Chapter X
Excitement built in Chester Martin as winter gave way to spring. Before long, spring would give way to summer. When summer came to Toledo, so would the Socialist Party national convention.
“Not Debs again!” he said to Albert Bauer. “He’s run twice, and he’s lost twice. We’ve got to pick somebody new this time, a fresh face. It’s not like it was in 1916, or in 1912, either. We’ve got a real chance to win this year.”
“In 1912 and 1916, you were a damn Democrat,” Bauer returned, stuffing an envelope. “What gives you the right to tell the Party what to do now?”
Martin’s wave took in the local headquarters. “That I am here now and wouldn’t have been caught dead here then. Proves my point, doesn’t it?”
His friend grunted. “Maybe you’ve got something,” Bauer said grudgingly. After a moment, though, he brightened. “This must be how the real old-time Socialists felt when Lincoln brought so many Republicans into the Party after the Second Mexican War. It was nice having more than half a dozen people come to meetings and vote for you, but a lot of the new folks didn’t know a hell of a lot about what Socialism was supposed to mean.”
“Are you saying I don’t know much?” Martin asked, amusement in his voice.
“Tell me about the means of production,” Albert Bauer said. “Explain why they don’t belong in the hands of the capitalist class.”
“I don’t have to sit still for examinations: I’m not in school any more, thank God,” Martin said. “I don’t know much about the means of production, and I don’t give a damn, either. What I do know is, the Democrats have jumped into bed with the fat cats. I want a party to jump into bed with me.”
“You’re voting your class interest,” Bauer said. “Well, that’s a start. At least you know you have a class interest, which is a devil of a lot more than too many people do. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble we’ve had educating the proletariat to fulfill its proper social role.”
“Yeah, and one of the reasons why is that you keep talking so fancy, nobody wants to pay any attention to you,” Martin said. “You keep on doing that, the Socialists are going to lose this election, same as they’ve lost all the others. And God only knows when we’ll ever have a better chance.”
By the way Bauer winced and grimaced, he knew he’d struck a nerve, maybe even struck it harder than he’d intended. “What do you think?” Bauer asked, shifting the subject a little. “Will TR run for a third term?”
“Nobody ever has before,” Martin answered, but that wasn’t the question Bauer had asked. At length, he said, “Yeah, I think he will. What’s he going to do, dust off his hands and walk away? Go hunt lions and elephants in Africa? You ask me, he likes doing what he’s doing. He’ll try and keep doing it.” He held up a forefinger. “Here’s one for you, Al: if Teddy does run again, will that make things easier or harder for us?”
“I’m damned if I know,” Bauer replied, his voice troubled. “Nobody knows. Maybe people will remember he fought the war and won it. If they do, they’ll vote for him. Or maybe they’ll remember how many men died and all the trouble we’ve had since. If they do that, they won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”
“The war will have been over for almost three and a half years by the time the election rolls around,” Martin said.
“That’s a fact.” Albert Bauer sounded glad it was a fact, too. “People don’t remember things very long. Of course”—he didn’t seem to want to be glad about anything—“the Great War is a big thing to forget.”
“Losing two elections in a row is a big thing to forget, too, and that’s what Debs has done,” Martin said. “If we do run him again, what’ll our slogan be? ‘Third time’s the charm’? I don’t think that’ll work.”
“He walks in and he knows all the answers.” Bauer might have been talking to the ceiling; since he spoke of Martin in the third person, he wasn’t—quite—talking to him. But then he was once more: “All right, all right, maybe not Debs. But if we don’t run him, who do we run? He’s the one fellow we’ve got who has a following across the whole damn country.”
“You pick somebody,” Chester Martin said. “You’re always going on about how you’re the old-time Red, so you have to know all these people. I’m nothing but a damn recruit. That’s what you keep telling me, anyway.”
“Go peddle your papers,” Bauer said. A little less gruffly, he continued, “Go on, take the rest of the day off. It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”
“Probably.” Martin got up from the table where he and his friend had been preparing fliers for mailing. “But if too many people find better things to do with their time than work for the Party, the work won’t get done. Where will we be then?”
“Up the same old creek,” Bauer admitted. “But the Rebs won’t capture Philadelphia if you have yourself a couple of beers or something.”
“Twist my arm,” Martin said, and Bauer did, not very hard. Martin groaned anyway. “Aii! There—you made me do it. See you later.”
When he stepped outside, spring was in the air. While he’d fought in the Roanoke Valley, it had arrived sooner and more emphatically than it did here by the shore of Lake Erie. That was the one good thing he could say about Virginia. Against it, he set filth and stench and horror and fear and pain and mud and lice. They sent the scales crashing down against the place.
How many veterans would weigh what they’d been through in the same fashion? Was what they’d done worth it? Could anything have been worth three years of hell on earth? He didn’t think so, especially not when he reckoned in the trouble he’d had after the war was over. Would the rest of the millions who’d worn green-gray—those of them left alive, anyhow—feel as he did? If so, Teddy Roosevelt faced more trouble than he guessed.
Red flags flew above the Socialists’ building. Toledo cops still prowled past. Martin no longer carried a pistol in his pocket. Something like peace had returned to the labor scene. He wondered how long it would last. The answer supplied itself: till the day after the election.
One of the policemen in brass-buttoned dark blue flashed Martin a thumbs-up. Martin was so surprised to get it, he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and almost fell. During the great wave of strikes, that cop had undoubtedly broken workers’ heads along with his goonish chums. Did he think he could turn into a good Socialist with one simple gesture? If he did, he was an even bigger fool than the usual run of cop.
Or maybe he was a straw, blowing in the wind of change. If a cop found it a good idea to show somebody coming out of the Socialist hall that he wasn’t hostile, who held the power? Who was liable to hold it after March 4, 1921? Maybe the policeman was hedging his bets.
“Won’t do you any good,” Martin muttered under his breath. “We’ll still remember you bastards. Hell, yes, we will.”
He listened to himself. That was when he began to think the party that had wandered so long in the wilderness might have a chance to come home at last. The Democrats had ruled the roost for a long time. They wouldn’t be happy about clearing out, not after all these years they wouldn’t.
“Too damn bad,” Martin said.
Red Socialist posters were plastered on every wall and fence and telegraph pole. They shouted for freedom and justice in big black letters. For once, more of them were up than their red-white-and-blue Democratic counterparts. Those showed the U.S. eagle flying high over a burning Confederate flag, and bore a one-word message: VICTORY!
As poster art went, the Democrats’ handbills were pretty good. The only drawback Chester Martin found in them was that they bragged about old news. As Bauer had said, people forgot things in a hurry.
Martin walked over to the trolley stop and rode back to the apartment building where he and his parents and sister lived. They were playing hearts three-handed. “About time you got home,” his father said. “This is a better game when the cards come out even when you deal ’em.”
“See what you get for starting without me?” Martin said, drawing up a chair.
“Dad wants to throw in this game because he’s losing,” his sister said. But Sue’s grin said she didn’t mind throwing it in, either.
“My own flesh and blood insult me,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “If I’d told my father anything like that—”
“Gramps would have laughed his head off, and you know it,” Martin said. He gathered the cards and fanned them in his hand. “Draw for first deal.” He ended up dealing himself. After generously donating the ace of spades and a couple of hearts to his mother, who sat on his left (and receiving a similar load of trash from his sister, who sat on his right), he called, “All right, where’s the deuce?”
Out came the two of clubs. As the hand was played, his father asked, “Did you get the whole world settled, there at the Socialist meeting hall?”
“Sure as heck did,” Martin said cheerfully. “The revolution of the proletariat starts next Wednesday, seven o’clock in the morning sharp. You’d better step lively, Pop—you don’t want to be late.” He took a trick with the ace of diamonds, then led the ten of spades. “Let’s see where the queen’s hiding.”
“Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,” his father said. As Chester’s mother had done, he ducked the spade. So did Sue. Stephen Douglas Martin went on, “Do people want it to be that rabblerousing fool of a Debs again?”
“Some people do,” Martin answered. “I think we’d have a better chance with somebody else.” Since the ten of spades had failed to flush out the queen, he led the nine. “Maybe this’ll make her show up.”
His mother pained and set out the ace of spades. His father grinned and tucked the king under it. His sister grinned even wider and dropped the queen, sticking his mother with thirteen points she didn’t want. “There you go, Ma,” Sue said sweetly.
“Thank you so much,” Louisa Martin said. She turned to her son. “When the revolution comes, will the queen only be worth one point, to make her equal with all the hearts in the deck?”
“Don’t know about that one, Ma,” Chester said. “I don’t think there’s a plank that talks about it in the Socialist Party platform.”
“Is there a plank that explains why they think we need anybody but bully old Teddy?” Stephen Douglas Martin inquired.
“I can think of two,” his son replied. “First one is, nobody’s ever had three terms. If TR decides to run again, he shouldn’t, either. And even if the Democrats run somebody else, they have to explain what we got for all the men who got killed and maimed during the war, and why they’ve been in the trusts’ pocket ever since.”
When he was around Albert Bauer, he sounded like a reactionary. When he was around his parents—who were, in his view of things, reactionaries—he sounded as radical as Bauer did. The more he thought about that, the funnier it seemed.
The quitting whistle’s scream cut through the din on the floor of the Sloss Works like a wedge splitting a stump. Jefferson Pinkard leaned on his crowbar. “Another day done,” he said. “Another million dollars.”
He wasn’t making a million dollars a day, but he was making better than a million a week. Next month, probably, he’d be up over a million a day. It didn’t matter. What the CSA called money was only a joke, one that kept getting funnier as the banknotes sprouted more and more zeros. The bottom line was, he’d lived better before the war than he did now. That was so for almost everybody in the Confederate States.
“See you in the mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian said.
“Yeah,” Jeff answered. “See you.” He didn’t make his voice cold on purpose; it just came out that way. The more he went to Freedom Party meetings, the less he cared to work alongside a black man. Vespasian turned away and headed for the time clock to punch out without another word. Pinkard wasn’t in the habit of bragging about going out on Freedom Party assault squadrons, but he wouldn’t have been surprised had Vespasian known about it. Blacks had funny ways of finding out things like that.
Too damn bad, Jeff thought. Tired and sweaty, he headed toward the time clock himself.
Going into and out of the Sloss foundry, whites had always hung with whites and Negroes with Negroes. That hadn’t changed. What had changed, lately, was how men from one group eyed those from the other. Blacks seemed warier than they had been during the war. Whites seemed less happy about having so many colored men around, doing jobs they wouldn’t have been allowed to do before the war started. Pinkard understood that down to the ground. It was how he felt himself.
He didn’t stop sweating just because he’d stopped working for the day. Spring had come to Birmingham full of promises about what the summer would be like. If those promises weren’t so many lies, summer would be hotter than hell, and twice as muggy. Summer in Birmingham was usually like that, so the promises probably held truth.
When he got close to home, Bedford Cunningham waved to him. Bedford was sitting on his own front porch, with a glass of something unlikely to be water on the rail in front of him. “Come on over after supper, Jeff,” he called. “We’ll hoist a few.” He hoisted the one sitting on the rail.
“Can’t tonight,” Pinkard answered. “Got a meeting.”
“Man alive.” Cunningham shook his head, back and forth, back and forth. By the way he did it, that one on the rail wasn’t the first he’d hoisted. “Never reckoned you’d dive into the Freedom Party like a turtle diving off a rock into a creek.”
It was, when you got down to it, a pretty fair figure of speech. Jeff felt a lot happier swimming in the river of the Party than he did out on a rock by his lonesome. He said, “Maybe you ought to come along, give yourself somethin’ to do besides gettin’ lit up.”
“I like getting lit up,” Cunningham said. “What the hell better have I got to do, anyhow? Can’t hardly work, not shy an arm. I’ll vote Freedom, sure as hell I will, but I don’t fancy sitting around and listening to people making speeches.”
“It’s not like that,” Jeff protested, but Bedford Cunningham was hoisting his glass again. With a shrug, Pinkard went up the walk and into his own house.
“Hello, dear,” Emily said. She tilted up her face for a kiss. He gave her one, rather a perfunctory job. She didn’t try to improve it. “I know you got your meeting tonight,” she went on when he let her go, “so supper’ll be on the table for you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She went back into the kitchen to dish it out. She didn’t shake her own tail, as she would have not so long before.
Jeff paid no attention to the change. “Good thing you remembered,” he told her. “Barney Stevens is back in town from Richmond, and he’s going to let us know what those bastards in Congress are up to. I don’t want to be late, not for that.”
“You won’t be,” Emily promised, her voice floating out through the hall. “Come on and set yourself down.”
He did, then shoveled chicken and dumplings into his face with the single-minded dedication a stoker might have shown in shoveling coal into a steam engine’s firebox. Then, after bestowing another absentminded kiss on his wife, he headed over to the closest trolley stop for the ride to the livery stable where the Freedom Party still met.
He felt at home there, more even than he did in the cottage he’d shared with Emily since the days before the war. Almost all the men who’d joined the Party were veterans, as he was; they’d fought the damnyankees in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Arkansas, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. And most of them had put on white shirts and butternut pants these past few months and gone charging forth to break up rival parties’ rallies and to remind the blacks of Birmingham where in the scheme of things they belonged.
“Freedom!” he said every time he shook somebody’s hand or slapped somebody else on the back. And men also reached out to clasp his hand and slap his back and hailed him with the one-word greeting that was also a battle cry. He might have been a Freemason or an Odd Fellow: everyone in the livery stable with him was his brother.
Along with everyone else, he stamped and whistled and clapped when Barney Stevens, massive and impressive in a black suit, strode to the front of the open area. “Freedom!” Stevens—now Congressman Stevens—called.
“Freedom!” his audience roared back. Jefferson Pinkard felt different when he used the slogan along with his comrades. It took on a power then that it lacked when it was simply a greeting. It became a promise, and at the same time a warning: anyone who didn’t care for the Freedom Party’s ideas needed to get out of the way, and in a hurry, too.
“Boys, we’ve got a power of work to do, and that’s a fact,” Barney Stevens said. “Nobody’s mucked out that big barn they call the Capitol in a hell of a long time. Most of the folks, they’ve been there since dirt, or else their pappies were there since dirt, and they’re taking over after the old man finally upped and dropped dead. Damn fancy-pants bluebloods.” Stevens fluttered his hand on a limp wrist. The Freedom Party men howled laughter. He went on, “But we’re starting to get things moving, to hell with me if we’re not. This business with passbooks was just the first shell in the bombardment. Let me tell you some of what I mean…”
After a while, Jeff found himself yawning. Stevens wasn’t a bad speaker—far from it. But Jeff hadn’t joined the Freedom Party to pay close attention to the nuts and bolts of policy. He’d joined because he’d felt down in his bones that something had gone dreadfully wrong with his country and he thought Jake Featherston could fix it.
Exactly how it got fixed didn’t matter so much to him as getting together every week with other people who followed Featherston and going out with them every so often to bust the heads of people who didn’t. That brought back the sense of camaraderie he’d known in the trenches: about the only good thing he’d known in the war.
And so, when Barney Stevens went on and on about hearings and taxes and tariffs and labor legislation, Jeff slipped from the middle of the open area in the livery stable toward the back. “Sorry, Grady,” he whispered after stepping on another man’s toes. He noticed he wasn’t the only fellow moving toward the back of the stable, either. Everybody was glad to have Stevens in Congress, but he’d lost part of his audience tonight. He’d been elected to take care of the details, not to bore everybody with them.
Pinkard wasn’t the first one to slide out the door. “My wife’s a bit poorly,” he whispered to the two burly guards as he left. They nodded. Odds were, they knew he was lying. He shrugged. He’d been polite—and he’d thrown half a million dollars into the big bowl by the door. As long as he was both polite and paid up, the guards didn’t care if he left early.
Since he was leaving early, Emily would probably still be awake. Maybe they’d make the mattress creak when he got home. For some reason, she’d acted kind of standoffish toward him lately. He’d take care of that, by God. Horning it out of her was the best way he knew—he’d enjoy it, too.
He took the trolley to the edge of Sloss company housing, then walked to his cottage. A few people still sat on their front porches, enjoying the fine night air. He wondered if he’d see Bedford Cunningham on his, drunk or passed out. But Bedford must have gone inside to bed, because he wasn’t there.
Pinkard’s own house was also dark, so he figured Emily had gone to bed, too. Well, if she had, he’d damn well wake her up. He turned his key in the lock. The door didn’t squeak as it swung on its hinges. He’d oiled them after he came home from the war, and quietly kept them oiled ever since. He’d caught Emily cheating on him once, and wanted a fair chance to do it again if she stepped out of line. She hadn’t, not that he knew of, but….
The hinges didn’t squeak, but something in the house was squeaking, squeaking rhythmically. He knew what that noise was. It came from the bedroom. Rage filled him, the same rage he knew when he put on white and butternut and went off to break heads, but focused now, as if with a burning glass.
“God damn you, Emily, you little whore!” he bellowed, and stomped down the hall toward the bedroom.
Twin cries of horror greeted him, one Emily’s, the other a man’s. They were closely followed by scrabbling noises, a thump, and the sound of running feet. Whoever’d been in there with Emily hadn’t wanted to face Jeff. As Jeff stormed in, his feet caught on something, then kicked something else: a man’s tangled trousers and his shoe. Whoever the fellow was, he’d departed too quickly to bother retrieving his clothes.
“Jeff, honey, listen to me—” Emily spoke in a quick, high, desperate voice.
“Shut up,” he said, and she did. She hugged the blanket to herself. The moonlight sliding in through the window—the window through which her lover had fled—showed her arms pale and bare against the dark blue wool.
He yanked the blanket off her. She was naked under it. He’d known she would be. Breathing hard, he lashed out and slapped her twice, forehand and backhand, fast as a striking snake. She gasped, but made no other sound. If he killed her on the spot, no jury would convict him. She had to know as much.
When he’d caught her the first time, she’d used all her bodily charms to mollify him. It had worked, too, even if he’d felt filthy and used as he traveled back to the front in west Texas. Now he aimed to use his body to take revenge. He undid his trousers, let them fall to the floor, and flung himself upon her.
She endured everything he did without a whimper, without a protest. In other circumstances, he might have admired that. Now he just wanted to break her, as if she were a wild horse. When his imagination and stamina ran out at last, he got up from the bed and lit the gas lamp above it. Having spent himself again and again, he was prepared to go easy—and too worn to do anything else.
Or so he thought, till he saw that the shirt on the floor had the left sleeve pinned up. “Bedford,” he whispered in a deadly voice. Emily’s face went pale as skimmed milk, which only made the bruises he’d given her look darker.
He pulled up his pants, then yanked her out of the bed and slung her over his shoulder. She squealed then, squealed and kicked. Ignoring everything she did, he carried her out of the cottage and dumped her, still naked, on the walk. Then he went back inside and locked the door behind him.
When she came up crying and wailing, he shouted, “Go to hell. You made your choice. Now you pay for it.” He’d made his choice, too. I’ll live with it, he thought. He went back to the bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep right away.
Arthur McGregor worried every time he left the room he’d taken in the cheap Winnipeg boardinghouse. He worried while he was in the room, too. That wasn’t because inside his trunk sat a wooden box containing the largest, finest bomb he’d ever made. He worried about the bomb when he left the room: he worried that someone would discover it, and that he wouldn’t be able to use it.
When he was in the sparsely furnished room, he worried about the farm. He worried about whether Maude and Julia and Mary could do everything that needed doing without his being there. He also occasionally worried about whether the story he and his family had put about—that he’d gone to visit cousins back in Ontario—would hold up under close scrutiny. If some bright Yank added two and two and happened to come up with four…
But the Yank likeliest to do that, Major Hannebrink, was dead. McGregor had made sure of that, and he’d got away with it. Now he was going to make sure of General Custer’s demise, too, and he thought he could get away with that. And, if he couldn’t, he was willing if not eager to pay the price.
“Strike a blow for freedom,” he muttered under his breath as he went downstairs for breakfast.
He wasn’t used to eating anyone’s cooking but Maude’s. The eggs here were fried too hard, while the bacon felt rubbery between his teeth. Morning chatter flowed around him. Apart from a “Good day” or two and a couple of polite nods, he added nothing to it.
Off he went, for all the world as if he had a job to which he didn’t want to be late. His landlady thought he did have a regular job. He’d made certain she thought that. If she thought anything different, the Yanks were liable to hear about it. That was the last thing he wanted.
Almost three years after the end of the Great War, Winnipeg presented an odd mixture of rubble and shiny new buildings, as if a phoenix had risen halfway from the ashes. In another few years, McGregor thought, it might turn into a handsome city again. The rubble would be forgotten. So would the buildings and the hopes from which that rubble had been made. The new Winnipeg would be an American city, not a Canadian one.
HORNE’S HOUSE PAINTS, said a sign on Donald Street. 37 COLORS AVAILABLE. If Horne had been in business before 1914, if he wasn’t a johnny-come-lately Yank, his sign would have advertised 37 COLOURS then. Even spelling changed under U.S. rule.
McGregor scowled. To him, COLORS looked clipped, unnatural…American. He stepped off the curb—and almost got clipped himself, by an American motorcar. An angry blast from the Ford’s horn sent him leaping back onto the sidewalk. “Watch out, you goddamn hayseed!” the driver screamed, in an accent unmistakably from the USA. “Ain’t you never seen an automobile before?” He stepped on the gas and whizzed away before McGregor could say a single word.
“Christ!” McGregor wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “That’d be all I need, stepping out in front of one of those damn things when I’m carrying…” He let his voice trail away. He did not intend to mention out loud what he might be carrying. He wouldn’t have come so close had he not just come close to getting killed.
Had so many motorcars scurried through the streets of Winnipeg before the Great War? McGregor had come up to the city only a couple of times in those days, so he couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think so. It might end up prosperous as well as handsome.
He didn’t care. He would sooner have been poor under King George than rich under the Stars and Stripes. The Yanks had taken his country away from him. If they expected him to be happy about it, they were in for a disappointment.
As a matter of fact, if they expected him to be happy about it, they were in for a big disappointment. He chuckled grimly—so grimly that a fellow in a business suit edged away from him. He didn’t notice. He wanted to make sure their disappointment was as big as possible.
He crossed the Donald Street bridge over the Assiniboine and strolled past a three-story building that had somehow come through the war intact. Soldiers in green-gray with pot-shaped helmets stood guard around the building in sandbagged machine-gun nests that gave it a formidable defensive perimeter. He didn’t linger. The U.S. guards asked pointed—or sometimes blunt—questions of people naive enough to linger around General Custer’s headquarters.
They would, without a doubt, ask even more pointed—or perhaps blunt—questions of anyone foolhardy enough to try to leave a wooden box anywhere in the neighborhood. McGregor had seen as much on his last trip to Winnipeg.
There was a park not far away. It didn’t even boast children’s swings. All it had were grass and a few benches. McGregor sat down on the grass and waited for noon. He’d done that a good many times by now, and come to know the park well. The earth here was not smooth, but full of round depressions of different sizes and depths. A narrow zigzag strip of low ground, partly obliterated by the depressions, ran across the park from east to west. The troops defending Winnipeg had made a stand here. McGregor grunted. They’d failed, damn them.
He wasn’t the only one out on this fine, mild day. Boys and girls frolicked where shells had burst and men had bled. An unshaven man in a filthy Canadian Army greatcoat and tattered khaki trousers lifted a bottle to his lips. He set it down slowly and reluctantly, as if its opening were the mouth of his beloved. In a drunken way, that was bound to be so.
McGregor killed time till the bells of the St. Boniface Cathedral, across the Red River, chimed twelve. He got up and ambled back by Custer’s headquarters. He’d timed it perfectly. He’d just gone past the building when a chauffeur-driven Packard—the motorcar that had almost run him down in Rosenfeld when Custer was on his way up to Winnipeg—pulled away from the front of the place. He kept on walking, hardly looking at the automobile, and turned west, away from the Red River.
After a little while, he went up Kennedy. Sure as the devil, there in front of a chophouse called Hy’s sat the Packard. The chauffeur remained on the front seat, eating a sandwich. General Custer and his aide, a tubby officer who seemed to accompany him everywhere, had gone inside.
McGregor smiled to himself. Custer dined at Hy’s every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He was reliable as clockwork. He ate his dinner somewhere else—McGregor hadn’t been able to find out where—on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So far as McGregor could tell, no swarm of guards surrounded him here.
Luck had had very little to do with McGregor’s discovering his weekday routine, or at least three-fifths of it. The embittered farmer had taken to tramping the streets of Winnipeg during the dinner hour, looking for that Packard. Patience paid, as patience has a way of doing. McGregor walked past the motorcar on the other side of the street. The driver paid him no attention whatever. Had he suddenly turned around and gone back the way he’d come, that might have drawn the fellow’s notice to him.
He couldn’t have that, not when he was so close. He made his way back to the park, though he didn’t go past Custer’s headquarters this time. “Now they shouldn’t see me at all,” he said as he sat down on the grass once more. No one heard him. The children were gone. The ex-soldier had passed out. His bottle lay empty beside him.
A little past five, McGregor returned to the boardinghouse. He ate the landlady’s frugal supper without complaint. Afterwards, he went up to his room and read Quentin Durward till he grew sleepy. Then he turned off the electric lamp and, so far as he knew, didn’t stir till morning.
Since the next day was Thursday, Custer wouldn’t be dining at Hy’s. McGregor walked in, went over to the bar, and ordered himself a Moosehead. As he drank the beer, he studied the place. He couldn’t very well plant the bomb among the seats; he had nowhere to conceal it there. But a lot of tables were close to the bar, and he’d packed a lot of dynamite and a lot of tenpenny nails for shrapnel into the wooden case he’d brought up from the farm. If he could hide it under the bar somewhere, that stood a good chance of doing the trick. The blast might even bring down the whole building…if the detonation worked as it should.
He worried about that, too. He’d known from his earlier trip to Winnipeg that he’d have to set this bomb and leave it. To make it go off when he wanted it to, he’d brought up an alarm clock, which he would set while he was planting the bomb. When it rang, the vibrating hammer and bells would set off the blasting caps he’d pack around them, which would in turn set off the dynamite. So he hoped, at any rate. But he knew the method was less reliable than a tripwire or a fuse.
“It will work,” he whispered fiercely. “It has to work.”
He got out of bed at two the next morning and sneaked out of the boardinghouse. He carried the bomb on his back with straps, as if it were a soldier’s pack. In one pocket of his coat were caps, in the other a small electric torch and a pry bar.
Winnipeg remained under curfew. If a patrolling U.S. soldier spotted him, he was liable to be shot then and there. If he got shot, he was liable to go straight to the moon then and there, in fragments of various sizes. He was taking any number of mad chances with this venture, and knew it. He didn’t care, not any more. Like a soldier about to go over the top, he was irrevocably committed.
An alley ran behind Hy’s. Motion there made his heart spring into his mouth, but it was only a cat leaping out of a garbage can. He wondered if the restaurant had a burglar alarm. He would find out by experiment. He let out a long, happy sigh when the back door yielded to the pry bar almost at once.
Tiptoeing through the kitchen, he came out in back of the bar, as if he were the greasy-haired gent who tended it. Only when he crouched behind it did he turn on the torch. He felt like cheering on seeing not only plenty of room under the bar to stash the bomb but also a burlap bag with which to hide it.
He wound the alarm clock and set it for one, then pried up the lid to the bomb, set the clock in place, and, handling them very carefully, packed the blasting caps by the bells. Then he replaced the lid, covered the box with the burlap sack, and left by the route he’d used to come. He closed the door behind him, risking the torch once more to see if the pry marks were too visible. He grinned: he could hardly see them at all. Odds were, no one else would even notice he’d come and gone.
He reentered the boardinghouse as stealthily as he’d left. Going back to sleep was hard. Getting up to appear to go to work was even harder. When he departed after breakfast, he didn’t pass by Custer’s headquarters, but used the next street over to head for the park. He settled himself on the grass to wait.
St. Boniface’s bells chimed the hours. After they rang twelve times, he began to fidget. Time seemed to crawl on hands and knees. How long till one o’clock? Forever? No. Before the bells chimed one, a far greater and more discordant blast of sound echoed through Winnipeg. Arthur McGregor sprang to his feet, shouting in delight. He frightened a few pigeons near him. Other than the pigeons, no one paid him the least attention.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling eyed General Custer with a sort of sad certainty. The old boy was having altogether too much fun for his own good. When his wife noticed how much fun he’d been having—and Libbie would; oh yes, she would—she would have some sharp things to say about it.
For the moment, though, Custer was doing the talking. He liked nothing better. “All in the line of duty,” he boomed, like a courting prairie chicken. “All in the line of duty, my dear.”
The reporter’s pencil scratched across the notebook page, filling it with shorthand pothooks and squiggles. “Tell me more,” Ophelia Clemens said. “Tell me how you happened to decide the War Department was using barrels the wrong way and how you came up with one that proved more effective.”
“I’d be glad to,” Custer said with a smile broad enough to show off all the coffee-stained splendor of his store-bought teeth.
I’ll bet you would, Dowling thought. He wouldn’t have minded having Ophelia Clemens interview him, either. She was a fine-looking woman—somewhere between forty and forty-five, Dowling guessed—with red-gold hair very lightly streaked with gray, and with an hourglass figure that had yielded nothing (well, next to nothing) to time.
Instead of answering her question, as he’d said he would, Custer asked one of his own: “How’d a pretty lady like you get into the newspaper business, anyhow? Most reporters I know have mustaches and smoke cigars.”
Miss Clemens—she wore no wedding band—shrugged. “My father was in the business for fifty years, till he died ten years ago. He taught me everything I know. For whatever it may be worth to you, he wore a mustache and smoked cigars. Now, then—” She repeated the question about barrels.
She’s sharp as a tack behind that pretty smile, Abner Dowling judged. Custer hadn’t figured that out yet; the pretty smile was all he noticed. His answer proved as much. He didn’t quite say God and a choir of angels had delivered the new doctrine for barrels to him from on high, but he certainly implied it.
Ophelia Clemens tapped the unsharpened end of her pencil against the spiral wire that held her notebook together. “Isn’t another reason the fact that you’ve been known for headlong attacks straight at the foe ever since the days of the War of Secession, and that barrels offered you the chance to do that again, except in a new way?”
Dowling wanted to kiss her for reasons that had nothing to do with the way she looked. She was sharp as a tack, by God. Custer had done nothing but go straight at the enemy all through the Great War. First Army had suffered gruesomely, too, sending attack after attack straight into the teeth of the Rebs’ defensive positions. If not for barrels, Custer would probably still be banging heads with his Confederate opposite numbers down in Tennessee.
Now he said, “What was that, Miss Clemens? My ears aren’t quite what they used to be, I’m afraid.” Dowling had seen him use that selective deafness before. He wasn’t too hard of hearing, not considering how old he was. But he was, and always had been, ever so hard of listening.
Patiently, Ophelia Clemens repeated the question, changing not a single word. As she did so, the bells of St. Boniface’s Cathedral, over on the east side of the Red River, announced the noon hour.
Custer had no trouble hearing the bells, even if he managed to miss the question again. He said, “Perhaps you’ll take luncheon with my adjutant and me, Miss Ophelia. There’s a very fine chophouse not ten minutes away that I visit regularly: in fact, I have a motorcar laid on that should be pulling up in front of this building right about now.”
“I’d be delighted,” the reporter said, “provided we can keep working through it. That way, my editors won’t mind picking up the tab for me.”
“Oh, very well,” Custer said with poor grace. He’d no doubt wanted to use the luncheon as a breather from her astute questions. But Ophelia Clemens wasn’t half bad at getting her own way, either.
When they boarded the chauffeured Packard, Custer got his way, placing himself between Dowling and Miss Clemens. The seat was crowded for three: both he and his adjutant took up a good deal of space. Had Custer been so tightly squeezed against another officer, he would have had something rude to say about Dowling’s girth. As things were, he didn’t complain a bit.
“Hy’s, Gallwitz,” Dowling said, realizing the general was otherwise occupied.
“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur put the Packard in gear.
At the chophouse, Custer got himself a double whiskey and tried to press the same on Ophelia Clemens. She contented herself with a glass of red wine. Dowling ordered a Moosehead. Say whatever else you would about them, the Canucks brewed better beer than they did down in the States.
Custer ordered a mutton chop and then, his glass having somehow emptied itself, another double whiskey. Dowling chose the mutton, too; Hy’s did it splendidly. Miss Clemens ordered a small sirloin—likely, Dowling thought, to keep from having to match Custer in any way.
The second double vanished as fast as the first had done. Custer began talking a blue streak. He wasn’t always perfectly clear, but he wasn’t always perfectly clear sober, either. Even after the food arrived, Ophelia Clemens kept taking notes. “Tell me,” she said, “from the viewpoint of the commanding general, what is the hardest thing about occupying Canada?”
“There’s too much of it, and I haven’t got a quarter of the troops I need,” Custer answered. Drunk or sober, that was his constant complaint, and one with a good deal of truth to it, too. He cut a big bite off his chop and continued with his mouth full: “Not a chance in…blazes of getting the men I need, either, not with the…blasted Socialists holding the purse strings in their stingy fists.”
“You would favor a third term for TR, then?” Miss Clemens asked: a shrewd jab if she knew of the rivalry between Roosevelt and Custer, as she evidently did.
I’m a soldier, and shouldn’t discuss politics, would have been the discreet answer. But Custer had already started discussing politics, and was discreet only by accident. He’d just put another forkful of mutton into his mouth when he got the question, and bit down hard on it, the meat, and the fork, all at the same time.
He bit down hard literally as well as metaphorically. Too hard, in fact: Dowling heard a snapping noise. Custer exclaimed in dismay: “Oh, fow Jeshush Chwisht’sh shake! I’ve bwoken my uppuh pwate!” He raised his napkin to his mouth and removed the pieces.
“I’m terribly sorry, General,” Ophelia Clemens said. Her green eyes might have sparkled. They definitely didn’t twinkle. Dowling admired her self-control.
He went over to the bartender and got the name and address of a nearby dentist. “He’ll have you fixed up in jig time, sir,” Dowling said, and then, “I’m sorry, Miss Clemens, but it looks like we’re going to break up early today.”
“That’sh wight,” Custer said, nodding. “I’m showwy, too, Mish Ophewia, but I’ve got to get thish fikshed.”
“I understand.” Ophelia Clemens kept on taking notes and asking questions. Dowling wondered if Custer’s embarrassment would become news from coast to coast. If so, too bad, Dowling thought. Custer had always courted publicity. That usually paid handsome dividends. Every once in a while, it took a bite out of him.
When they got out to the automobile, Dowling told Gallwitz where to take Custer. Ophelia Clemens got in, too. No matter how mushy Custer sounded, she wanted to finish the interview. “Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said, stolid as always. He started the engine; the Packard rolled smoothly down Kennedy Street.
He’d just turned right onto Broadway, where the dentist had his office, when the world blew up behind the motorcar. The roar sounded like the end of the world, that was for sure. Windows shattered on both sides of the street, showering passersby with glass. The Packard’s windshield shattered, too. Most of the glass it held, luckily, blew away from the chauffeur. Gallwitz shouted anyway, in surprise and maybe fright as well. Dowling could hardly blame him.
And Custer shouted, “Shtop the automobiwe! Tu’n awound! Go back! We’ve got to shee what happened and what we can do to he’p!” He should have sounded ridiculous—an old man with no teeth, real or false, in his upper jaw, bellowing like a maniac. Somehow, he didn’t.
“Yes, sir,” Gallwitz said, and spun the motorcar through a U-turn that would have earned him a ticket from any traffic cop in the world.
“My God,” Dowling said when he saw the devastation on Kennedy. “My God,” he repeated when he saw where the devastation centered. “That’s Hy’s. I mean, that was Hy’s.” Only rubble remained of the chophouse, rubble from which smoke and flames were beginning to rise.
“A bomb,” Ophelia Clemens said crisply. “A bomb undoubtedly meant for you, General Custer. What do you make of that?” She poised pencil above notebook to record his answer.
“Cowa’d’sh way to fight,” he said, as if he’d almost forgotten she was there—most unusual for Custer with a journalist, especially a good-looking female journalist, in range. “Canucksh have awwaysh been cowa’d’sh.” Even now, Custer got in a dig at the country from which the men who’d killed his brother had come. He pounded Gallwitz on the shoulder. “Shtop!” Gallwitz did, as close as he could get to the shattered Hy’s. Custer sprang out of the Packard. “Come on, Dowwing! Let’sh shee if we can weshcue anybody!”
Dowling came. Men and women were spilling out of the shops and houses and offices around Hy’s, some bleeding and screaming, others looking around for someone to lead them into action. Custer did just that, and people hastened to obey his orders even if his voice did sound mushy or maybe drunk. With a plain problem set right in front of his face, he was a world-beater.
“Buwwy!” he cried when Dowling and a fellow in a barber’s white shirt and apron dragged a groaning, smoke-blackened man from the ruins of Hy’s. “Now—have we got a docto’? We need a bucket bwigade to keep the fwamesh down unti’ a fiwe engine getsh heah. You, you, and you! Find wunning watuh! We’ve got to do what we can!”
“He’s in his element, isn’t he?” Ophelia Clemens said to Dowling.
“Yes, ma’am,” Custer’s adjutant answered. Loyally, he went on, “You see what a fine commander he is.”
“Oh, poppycock,” she said. “These are the talents of a captain or a major, not the talents of a four-star general. The evidence that he has the talents of a four-star general is moderately thin on the ground, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, ma’am,” Dowling replied, loyal still, though he thought Miss Clemens had hit the nail right on the head. With someone pointing his battalion at an enemy strongpoint and saying Take it, Custer would go right at it, ahead of all his men, and take the position or die trying. During the Great War, an awful lot of his men had died trying, because smashing through was all he’d ever known.
Here, for one brief shining moment, fate—and the luck of a broken dental plate—had put him back in his element. Was he enjoying himself? Looking at him, listening to his insistent commands, Dowling could not doubt he was.
A woman stuck a box of arrowroot cough lozenges into her handbag. “Thank you kindly,” she told Reggie Bartlett. “Freedom!”
Reggie grimaced, as he did whenever he heard that salutation. “Those people are crazy, and there’s more of them every day,” he said to his boss.
Jeremiah Harmon shrugged. “Their money spends as good as anybody else’s,” he said, and then gave a thumbs-down. “Which is to say, not very.” He laughed. So did Reggie. He’d charged the woman a quarter of a million dollars for her lozenges, and wasn’t sure whether the drugstore had made or lost money on the transaction.
A tall, rather pale man about his own age came up to the counter and set down a jar of shaving soap. He looked vaguely familiar, though Bartlett couldn’t recall where he’d seen him before. “Good to hear somebody who can’t stand the Freedom Party lunatics and isn’t afraid to come out and say so,” he remarked.
When he spoke, Reggie knew him. “You’re Tom, uh, Brearley. You married Maggie Simpkins after she showed me the door.”
“So I did, and happy I did it, too,” Brearley answered. He looked at Reggie out of the corner of his eye, as if wondering whether the druggist’s assistant were about to grab a stove lifter and try to brain him with it.
Reggie harbored no such intentions. He wanted to talk about the Freedom Party, was what he wanted to do. Instead of a stove lifter, he brandished a newspaper at Brearley. “Ten thousand people for a rally down in Charleston the other day, if you can believe it. Ten thousand people!” He opened up the paper and went hunting for the quotation he wanted: “‘Party district manager Roger Kimball told the cheering crowd, “This is only the beginning.” ’”
“Jesus Christ!” Brearley started violently, then checked himself. “Doesn’t surprise me one damn bit that he ended up in the Freedom Party,” he said. “He would, as a matter of fact. As bloodthirsty a son of a bitch as ever hatched out of his egg.”
“You know him?” Reggie asked, as he was surely supposed to.
“I was his executive officer aboard the Bonefish for most of the last two years of the war—till the very end.” Brearley looked as if he’d started to add something to that, but ended up holding his peace.
“That’s a real kick in the head.” Bartlett shuffled through the newspaper again. “Other thing it says here is that a gal named Anne Colleton’s been pumping money into the Party down in South Carolina. ‘We have to put our country back on its feet again,’ she says.”
He’d surprised Brearley again. “You know Anne Colleton?” the former Navy man asked.
“If I knew a rich lady, would I be working here?” Bartlett asked. From the back of the drugstore, his boss snorted. Brearley chuckled. Reggie went on, “On the Roanoke front, though, I had a CO name of Colleton, Tom Colleton. He was from South Carolina, too. Her husband, I bet, or maybe her brother.”
“Brother.” Brearley’s voice held certainty. “She’s not married. Roger knows her, any way you want to take the word. Every time he’d come back to the boat after a leave, he’d brag like a fifteen-year-old who just laid his first nigger whore.”
“Small world,” Reggie said. “You know him, I know her brother, they know each other.” He blinked; he hadn’t intended to burst into rhyme.
“I wonder how well they know each other,” Brearley said in musing tones. He caught the gleam in Reggie’s eye and shook his head. “No, not like that. But Roger’s done some things that don’t bear bragging about. You’d best believe he has.”
“Oh, yeah?” Reggie set his elbows on the countertop and leaned across it. “What kind of things?”
But Brearley shook his head in a different way. “The less I say, the better off I’ll be, and the better off you’re liable to be, too. But if I could tell my story to Anne Colleton, that might drive a wedge between ’em, and that couldn’t help hurting the Party.”
“Anything that hurts the Freedom Party sounds good to me.” Reggie leaned forward even more. “How about this? Suppose I write a letter to Tom Colleton? I’ll tell him you want to talk to his sister because you know something important.”
“He’s liable to be in the Freedom Party up to his eyebrows, too,” Brearley said.
“If he is, I’m only out a stamp,” Bartlett answered. “What’s ten grand? Not worth worrying about. But his name isn’t in the paper, so maybe he’s not.”
“All right, go ahead and do it,” Brearley said. “But be mysterious about it, you hear? Don’t mention my name. Just say you know somebody. This really could be my neck if these people decide to come after me, and they might.”
“I’ll be careful,” Bartlett promised. He wondered if Brearley was in as much danger as he thought he was, or if he was letting his imagination run away with him. Had Reggie cared more about losing Maggie Simpkins, he might have thought about avenging himself on the ex–Navy man. As a matter of fact, he did think about it, but only idly.
Brearley took out his wallet. “What do I owe you for this?” he asked, pointing to the almost forgotten shaving soap.
“Four and a quarter,” Reggie said. “Good thing you got it now. If you came in here next week, you can bet it’d cost more.”
“Yeah, that’s not as bad as I thought.” Brearley handed Reggie a crisp, new $500,000 banknote. Reggie gave him a $50,000 banknote, two $10,000 notes, and one valued at a minuscule $5,000. As he made change, he laughed, remembering when—not so very long before—the idea of a $5,000 banknote, let alone one worth half a million dollars, would have been too absurd for words.
“I will write that letter,” Reggie said. “I saw this Jake Featherston on a stump not long after the war ended—so long ago, you could still buy things for a dollar. I thought he was crazy then, and I haven’t seen anything since to make me want to change my mind.”
“Roger Kimball’s not crazy, but he can be as mean as a badger with a tin can tied to its tail,” Brearley said. “Not the sort of fellow you’d want for an enemy, and not the sort of fellow who’s got a lot of savory friends.”
“Maybe we’ll be able to bring both of ’em down, or help, anyway,” Reggie said. “Here’s hoping.” He paused. “If you care to, give my best to Maggie. If you don’t care to, I’ll understand, believe me.”
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” Brearley picked up the shaving soap and walked out of the drugstore. Bartlett nodded at his back. He hadn’t expected anything much different. Then he nodded again. Anything he could do to sidetrack the Freedom Party struck him as worthwhile.
Jeremiah Harmon came up and set a bottle full of murky brown liquid on the shelf below the counter. “Here’s Mr. Madison’s purgative,” the druggist said. “If this one doesn’t shift him, by God, nothing ever will. I reckon he’ll be by after he gets off at the bank.”
“All right, boss,” Bartlett said. “I’ll remember it’s there.”
“That’s fine.” Harmon hesitated, then went on, “You want to be careful what you get yourself into, Reggie. I heard some of what you and that fellow were talking about. All I’ve got to say is, when a little man gets in the prize ring with a big tough man, they’re going to carry him out kicking no matter how game he is. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“I sure do.” Reggie took a deep breath. “Other side of the coin is this, though: if nobody gets in the ring with a big tough man, he’ll go and pick fights on his own.” That didn’t come out exactly the way he’d wanted it to; he hoped Harmon followed what he’d meant.
Evidently, the druggist did. “All right, son,” he said. “It’s a free country—more or less, anyway. You can do as you please. I wanted to make sure you didn’t do anything before you thought it through.”
“Oh, I’ve done that,” Reggie assured him. “My own government sent me out into the trenches. The damnyankees shot me twice and caught me twice. What can the Freedom Party do to me that’s any worse?”
“Nothing, maybe, if you put it like that,” Harmon allowed. “All right, then, go ahead—not that you need my permission. And good luck to you. I’ve got the feeling you’re liable to need it.” He went back to his station at the rear of the store and began compounding another mixture.
In due course, Mr. Madison did appear. Reggie’s opinion was that his bowels would perform better if he lost weight and got some exercise. Like most people, Madison cared nothing for Reggie’s opinion. Studying the bottle, he said, “You’re sure this one is going to work?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Reggie said. “Mr. Harmon says it’s a regular what-do-you-call-it—a depth charge, that’s it. Whatever’s troubling you, it won’t be.”
“Christ, I hope not.” As Mrs. Dinwiddie had done before, as people had a habit of doing, the bank clerk proceeded to tell Bartlett much more about the state of his intestinal tract than Reggie had ever wanted to know. After far too long, Madison laid down his money, picked up the precious purgative, and departed.
Reggie paid less attention to his work the rest of that day than he should have. He knew as much, but couldn’t help it. His boss overlooked lapses that would have earned a dressing-down most of the time. Harmon had no great love for the Freedom Party, even if he declined to get very excited about it.
At last, Reggie got to go home. The bare little flat where he lived wasn’t anything much. Tonight, it didn’t need to be. He found a clean sheet of paper and wrote the letter. Then—another triumph—he found an envelope. He frowned. How to address it?
After some thought, he settled on Major Tom Colleton, Marshlands Plantation, South Carolina. He had no idea whether the plantation was still a going concern; he’d been in a Yankee prisoner-of-war camp when the black rebellion broke out in the CSA. With that address, though, the letter ought to get to the right Tom Colleton. He was just glad he’d managed to recall the name of the plantation; he couldn’t have heard it more than a couple of times.
He licked a stamp and set it on the envelope. The stamp didn’t have a picture of Davis or Lee or Longstreet or Jackson or a scene of Confederate soldiers triumphing over the damnyankees, as most issues up through the war had done. It said C.S. POSTAGE at the top. The design, if it deserved such a name, was of many concentric circles. Printed over it in black were the words TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.
His important work done, Reggie read the Richmond Examiner and then a couple of chapters of a war novel written by someone who didn’t seem to have come close to the front. Reggie liked that sort better than the realistic ones: it gave him something to laugh at. The way things were, he took laughter wherever he could find it.
The next morning, he woke up before the alarm clock did its best to imitate a shell whistling down on his trench. He hadn’t done that in a while. After frying himself some eggs, he carried the letter to the mailbox on the corner and dropped it in. He nodded, well pleased, as he headed toward Harmon’s drugstore. If he’d dawdled for a week, the cost of a stamp would probably have gone up to $25,000.
He looked back over his shoulder at the mailbox. “Well,” he said, “let’s see what that does.”
Jonathan Moss turned the key in his mailbox. Since he was sober, he had no trouble choosing the proper key or getting it to fit. Whether the mail would be worth having once he took it out of the box was another question. The bulk of what he got went straight into the trash.
“There ought to be a law against wasting people’s time with so much nonsense,” he said. He knew perfectly well that such a law would violate the First Amendment. Faced with a blizzard of advertising circulars, he had trouble caring about free-speech issues.
Then he saw the envelope franked with a two-cent stamp with an ONTARIO overprint. His heart neither fluttered nor leaped. He let out a resigned sigh. He wouldn’t throw that envelope into the wastebasket unopened, as he would a lot of others, but he’d learned better than to get too excited about such things.
When he got up to his apartment, he slit the envelope open. It held just what he’d expected: a postal money order and a note. The money order was for $12.50. The note read, Dear Mr. Moss, With this latest payment I now owe you $41.50. I hope to get it all to you by the end of the year. The crops look pretty good, so I should have the money. God bless you again for helping me. Laura Secord.
She’d been sending him such money orders, now for this amount, now for that, since the middle of winter. He’d written her that it wasn’t necessary. She’d ignored him. The only thing he’d managed to do—and it hadn’t been easy—was persuade her she didn’t owe him any interest.
“Lord, what a stiff-necked woman,” he muttered. He’d realized that when he was up in Canada during the war. She hadn’t bent an inch in her animosity toward the Americans.
He’d made her bend to the extent of being polite to him. He hadn’t made her bend to the extent of wanting to stay obligated to him one instant longer than she had to. As soon as she’d paid off the last of what she owed, she could go back to pretending he didn’t exist.
He couldn’t even refuse to redeem the money orders. Oh, he could have, but it wouldn’t have made things any easier for Laura Secord. She’d already laid out the cash to buy the orders. Not redeeming them would have been cutting off his nose to spite his face.
“Haven’t you done enough of that already?” he asked himself. Since he had no good answer, he didn’t try to give himself one.
He cooked a little beefsteak on the stove, then put some lard in with the drippings and fried a couple of potatoes to go with it. That didn’t make a fancy supper, but it got rid of the empty feeling in his belly. He washed the plate and silverware and scrubbed the frying pan with steel wool. His housekeeping was on the same order as his cooking: functional, efficient, uninspired.
Once he’d taken care of it, he hit the books. Bar examinations would be coming up in the summer. Much as he’d enjoyed most of his time at the Northwestern law school, he didn’t care to wait around another semester to retake the exams after failing.
A tome he studied with particular diligence was titled, Occupation Law: Administration and Judicial Proceedings in the New American Colonial Empire. The field, naturally, had swollen in importance since the end of the Great War. Before the war, it had hardly been part of U.S. jurisprudence at all, as the United States, unlike England, France, and Japan, had owned no colonial empire. How things had changed in the few years since! Occupation law was said to form a large part of the examination nowadays.
Moss told himself that was the only reason he worked so hard with the text. Still, if he decided to hang out his shingle somewhere up in Canada, it behooved him to know what he was doing, didn’t it? He didn’t think about hanging out his shingle anywhere near Arthur, Ontario…not more than a couple of times, anyway.
He realized he couldn’t study all the time, not if he wanted to stay within gibbering distance of sane. The next morning, he met his friend Fred Sandburg at the coffeehouse where they’d whiled away—wasted, if one felt uncharitable about it—so much time since coming to law school.
“You’ve got that look in your eye again,” Sandburg said. Moss knew he was a better legal scholar than his friend, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go up against Fred in a courtroom: Sandburg was ever so much better at reading people than he was at reading books. He went on, “How much did she send you this time?”
“Twelve-fifty,” Moss answered. He paused to order coffee, then asked, “How the devil do you do that?”
“All in the wrist, Johnny my boy; all in the wrist.” Sandburg cocked his, as if about to loose one of those newfangled forward passes on the gridiron. Moss snorted. His friend said, “No, seriously—I don’t think it’s something you can explain. Sort of like card sense, if you know what I mean.”
“Only by hearing people talk about it,” Jonathan Moss confessed sheepishly. “When I played cards during the war, I lost all the damn time. Finally, I quit playing. That’s about as close to card sense as I ever got.”
“Closer than a lot of people come, believe me,” Fred Sandburg said. “Some of the guys I played with in the trenches, it’d take inflation like the damn Rebs are having to get them out of the holes they dug for themselves.”
Up came the waitress. She set coffee in front of Moss and Sandburg. Sandburg patted her on the hip—not quite on the backside, but close—as she turned away. She kept walking, but smiled at him over her shoulder. Moss was gloomily certain that, had he tried the same thing, he’d have ended up with hot coffee in his lap and a slap planted on his kisser. But Fred had people sense, no two ways about it.
Moss decided to put his pal’s people sense to some use and to change the subject, both at the same time: “You think Teddy Roosevelt can win a third term?”
“He’s sure running for one, isn’t he?” Sandburg said. “I think he may very well, especially if the Socialists throw Debs into the ring again. You’d figure they’d have better sense, but you never can tell, can you? As a matter of fact, I hope Teddy loses. Winning would set a bad precedent.”
“Why?” Moss asked. “Don’t you think he’s done enough to deserve to get elected again? If anybody ever did, he’s the one.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Sandburg said. “What bothers me is that, if he wins a third term, somewhere down the line somebody who doesn’t deserve it will run, and he’ll win, too.”
“All right. I see what you’re saying,” Moss told him, nodding. “How many other people will worry about that, though?”
“I don’t know,” Sandburg admitted. “I don’t see how anybody could know. But I’ll bet the answer is, more than you’d think. If it weren’t, we’d have elected someone to a third term long before this.”
“I suppose so.” Moss sipped his coffee. He watched people stroll past the coffeehouse. When a man with only one leg stumped by on a pair of crutches, he sighed and said, “I wonder how the fellows who didn’t come through the war would vote now if they had a chance.”
“Probably not a whole lot different than the way our generation will end up voting,” Sandburg said. Moss nodded; that was likely to be true. His friend continued, “But we’re in the Half Generation, Johnny my boy. Every vote we cast will count double, because so many of us haven’t even got graves to call our own.”
“The Half Generation,” Moss repeated slowly. “That’s not a bad name for it.” He waved for the waitress and ordered a shot of brandy to go with the coffee. Only after he’d knocked back the shot did he ask the question that had come into his mind: “Did you ever feel like you didn’t deserve to come back in one piece? Like fellows who were better than you died, but you just kept going?”
“Better fighters? I don’t know about that,” Fred Sandburg said. “Harder to tell on the ground than it was in the air, I expect. But I figured out a long time ago that it’s just fool luck I’m still breathing and the fellow next to me caught a bullet in the neck. I don’t guess that’s too far from what you’re saying.”
“It’s not,” Moss said. For that matter, Sandburg had caught two bullets and was still breathing. No doubt luck had a great deal to do with that. Moss wished there were something more to it. “I feel I ought to be living my own life better than I am, to make up for all the lives that got cut short. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Some, yeah.” Sandburg cocked an eyebrow. “That’s why you’re still mooning over this Canuck gal who sends you rolls of pennies every couple of weeks, is it? Makes sense to me.”
“God damn you.” But Moss couldn’t even work up the energy to sound properly indignant. His buddy had got him fair and square. He defended himself as best he could: “You don’t really have much say about who you fall in love with.”
“Maybe not,” Sandburg said. “But you’re not quite ready to be a plaster saint yet, either, and don’t forget it.”
“I don’t want to be a plaster saint,” Moss said. “All I want is to be a better person than I am.” This time, he caught the gleam in Fred’s eye. “You tell me that wouldn’t be hard and I’ll give you a kick in the teeth.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort,” Sandburg answered primly. “And I’ll be damned if you can prove anything different.”
“You’re not in court now, Counselor,” Moss said, and they both laughed. “But what the devil are we going to do—the Half Generation, I mean, not you and me—for the rest of our lives? We’ll always be looking over our shoulders, waiting for the other half to come up and give us a hand. And they won’t. They can’t. They’re dead.”
“And you were the one who just got through saying Teddy Roosevelt deserved a third term,” Sandburg pointed out. “And I was the one who said I couldn’t argue with you. God help us both.”
“God help us both,” Jonathan Moss agreed. “God help the world, because there’s hardly a country in it that doesn’t have a Half Generation. With the Canucks, it’s more like a Quarter Generation.”
“Italy came through all right,” Sandburg said. “The Japs didn’t get hurt bad, either, damn them.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to have a heart-to-heart talk with the Japs one day, sure enough,” Moss said. “They’re like England, only more so: they don’t really know they were on the losing side.” He thought for a moment. “The only thing worse than going through the Great War, I guess, would have been going through the Great War and losing. Roosevelt saved us from that, anyway.”
“So he did.” Sandburg’s whistle was low and doleful. “Can you imagine what this country would be like if the Rebs had licked us again? We’d have had ourselves another revolution, so help me God we would. I don’t mean Reds, either. I just mean people who’d have wanted to hang every politician and every general from the nearest lamppost they could find.”
“Like this Freedom Party down in the CSA,” Moss said, and Sandburg nodded. Moss went on, “You know, maybe TR really does deserve a third term. Even if he didn’t do anything else, he spared us that.” His friend nodded again. Moss discovered he still had a couple of drops of brandy in the bottom of the shot glass. He raised it again. “To TR!” he said, and drained them.