Chapter XVI
Abner Dowling went into General Custer’s office. The commander of U.S. forces in Canada was scribbling changes on a report Dowling had typed. Some of them, Dowling saw, reversed changes he’d made in an earlier report. Usually, that would have infuriated Custer’s adjutant—not that Dowling could do anything about it. Today, though, he felt uncommon sympathy for his vain, irascible superior.
“Sir?” he said. Custer didn’t look up. Maybe he didn’t hear. Maybe he didn’t want to hear. Dowling could hardly have blamed him were that so. But he had to make Custer notice him. “Sir!”
“Eh?” With surprise perhaps genuine, perhaps well feigned, Custer shoved the papers aside. “What is it, Dowling?”
Either he’d entered his second childhood the night before or he knew perfectly well what it was. Dowling didn’t think senility had overcome the old coot as suddenly as that. He said, “Sir, Mr. Thomas is here to see you. He’s from the War Department.” He added that last in case Custer had gone around the bend in the past twenty-four hours.
Custer sighed, his wrinkled features drooping. He knew what that meant, all right. “No reprieve, eh?” he asked, like a prisoner who would hang in the morning if the governor didn’t wire. Dowling shook his head. Custer sighed again. “Very well, Lieutenant Colonel. Bring him in. If you care to, you may stay and listen. This will affect you, too.”
“Thank you, sir. By your leave, I will do that.” Dowling tried to recall the last time Custer had been so considerate. He couldn’t. He went out to the anteroom and said, “Mr. Thomas, General Custer will see you now.”
“Good.” N. Mattoon Thomas got to his feet. He was a tall, long-faced man in his late thirties, and looked more like a preacher than Upton Sinclair’s assistant secretary of war. He walked with a slight limp; Dowling knew he’d taken a machine-gun bullet in the leg during the Great War.
When they’d gone down the short hallway to Custer’s sanctum, Dowling said, “Mr. Thomas, I have the honor to present to you General George Custer. General, the assistant secretary of war.” Being one of the civilians overseeing the Army, Thomas took precedence over Custer in the introductions.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Custer said: a palpable lie. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Please—sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” As Thomas did so, Abner Dowling also took a seat. He tried to be unobtrusive, which wasn’t easy with his bulk. N. Mattoon Thomas’ blue eyes flicked his way, but the assistant secretary of war only nodded, accepting his presence.
Custer would have said something more then, but the words seemed stuck in his throat. He sent Dowling a look of appeal, but it wasn’t Dowling’s place to speak. He was here only as an overweight fly on the wall.
Before the silence could grow too awkward, Thomas broke it, saying, “General, I wish to convey to you at the outset President Sinclair’s sincere appreciation for the excellent service you have given your country in this difficult and important post.”
“That’s kind of him,” Custer said. “Very kind of him. I’m honored to have him send someone to deliver such a generous message in person. You came a long way to do it, sir, and I’m grateful.”
He was going to be difficult. Dowling would have bet he’d be difficult, but hadn’t looked for him to be quite so gracefully difficult. Maybe Libbie had coached him. She was even better at being difficult than her husband.
N. Mattoon Thomas gave him the look of a preacher who’d had the collection plate come back with thirty-seven cents and a subway token on it. “In view of your long career in the U.S. Army, General, the president feels it is time for you to come home to well-deserved thanks and to rest on your laurels hereafter,” he said.
“Mr. Thomas, I have no desire to rest on my laurels,” Custer replied. “I am as hale and spry as a man of my years can be, and I do not believe those years have adversely affected my ability to reason clearly and to issue appropriate orders. I have been in the saddle a long time. I should like to continue.”
“I am afraid I must remind you, General, that you serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States.” Thomas was less than half Custer’s age. But he had the power in this situation, and also had the ruthlessness that came naturally to many young men given power over their elders.
Dowling saw that, and pitied Custer. Custer saw it, too, and grew angry. He dropped his polite mask as if he’d never donned it. “Christ, I despise the notion of taking orders from that Socialist pipsqueak,” he growled.
“Which is one reason the president takes a certain pleasure in giving them to you,” Thomas replied easily. “Would you prefer to retire, General, or to be sacked? Those are your only choices now.”
“Teddy Roosevelt could sack me and not worry about what happened next,” Custer said. “He was a soldier himself—not so good a soldier as he thought he was, but a soldier nonetheless. President Sinclair will have a harder time of it: the papers will hound him for months if he dismisses me, for he has not the prestige, the authority—call it what you like—to do so without reminding people of his own inexperience in such matters.”
That all made excellent political sense to Abner Dowling. Custer the political animal had always been far more astute than Custer the soldier. Dowling glanced toward Thomas, wondering how Upton Sinclair’s assistant secretary of war would take such defiance.
It fazed him not at all. He said, “General Custer, the president predicted you would say something to that effect. He told me to assure you he was determined to seek your replacement, and that he would dismiss you out of hand if you offered difficulties. Here is his letter to you, which he instructed me to give you if it proved necessary.” Thomas reached into his breast pocket and took out an envelope, which he passed across the desk to Custer.
The commandant of U.S. forces in Canada had taken off his reading glasses when Thomas came in. Now he put them back on. He opened the envelope, which was not sealed, and drew forth the letter inside. It must have been what Thomas said it was, for his cheeks flushed with rage as he read.
“Why, the arrogant puppy!” he burst out when he was through. “I saved the country from the limeys when he was still making messes in his drawers, and he has the impudence to write a letter like this? I ought to let him sack me, by jingo! I can’t think of anything else likely to do the Socialists more political harm.”
“General—” Dowling began. Custer had a large—indeed, an enormous—sense of his own importance. Much of that was justified. Not all of it was, a fact to which he sometimes proved blind.
N. Mattoon Thomas held up a large, long-fingered hand. “Let General Custer decide as he will, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “If he prefers being ignominiously flung out of the Army he has served so well for so long to being allowed to retire and to celebrate his achievements as they deserve, that is his privilege.”
Dowling sucked in a long breath. President Sinclair had sent the right man up to Winnipeg to do this job. Thomas could be smooth, but under that smoothness he had steel, sharp steel. Dowling had not realized it till that moment. Like so many professional soldiers, he’d assumed any Socialist had to be soft.
Custer, evidently, had assumed the same thing. Hearing the cool contempt in Thomas’voice, he was discovering he’d made a mistake. He could hardly have looked more horrified. “Mr. Thomas…” he began.
“Yes, General?” Once again, Thomas was the picture of urbanity.
“Perhaps I was a mite hasty, Mr. Thomas,” Custer said. He’d never willingly retreated in battle, but he was backpedaling now.
“Perhaps you were.” The assistant secretary of war let the slightest hint of scorn show in his agreement. Dowling eyed him with respect verging on alarm. He was a formidable piece of work, was N. Mattoon Thomas.
“Could—Could we arrange it so that I need not retire immediately?” Custer asked. Now he was grasping at straws. Soldiers in the USA had political power only when politicians chose to acknowledge it. By refusing to do that, Sinclair and Thomas left Custer nowhere to stand.
And Thomas, now that he’d won, was willing to let Custer have a straw. “We could indeed,” he said. “President Sinclair has instructed me that your retirement may take effect as late as the first of August—provided you give me a letter announcing your intention to retire before I leave this room.”
“Damn you,” Custer muttered. Thomas pretended not to hear. Dowling knew he was pretending, because he himself had no trouble hearing at all. The general pulled a piece of paper from a desk drawer and wrote rapidly—and furiously, if the way the pen scratched over the paper gave any clue. When he was done, he thrust the sheet at Thomas. “There!”
The assistant secretary of war read it carefully before nodding. “Yes, this appears to be satisfactory,” he said. “I will announce it directly on my return to Philadelphia.” He folded it and put it into the envelope in which he’d brought President Sinclair’s letter to Custer. “And, now that the retirement is in order, you may, as I said before, mark it in any way you like. If you want to stop at every town between here and the U.S. border and parade through it with a brass band, go right ahead. When you reach Philadelphia, the president will lead the cheers for you.”
“Of course he will—it’ll make him look good.” Now that the deed was done, Custer bounced back fast. He leaned forward across the desk toward N. Mattoon Thomas. “And I’ll tell you why he won’t let me retire after August first, either—because he knows damn well it’ll raise a stink, and he wants to make sure the stink dies down before the Congressional elections this fall.”
“It could be,” Thomas answered. “I’m not saying it is, mind you, but it could be.” He got to his feet. “Whether it is or not, though, is neither here nor there. No, no need to escort me out, Lieutenant Colonel Dowling. Now that I have what I came for, my driver will take me back to the train station, and then I can return to my duties in Philadelphia. A very good day to you both, gentlemen.” Away he went, young, confident, powerful.
George Custer let out a long sigh. “Well, Dowling, I think it may at last be just about over. I squeezed a couple of more years of active duty out of Teddy Roosevelt, and got what I really wanted from him, too, but you can’t win all the time.”
“There can’t be many who had a longer run, sir,” Dowling answered. He did his best to sound consoling while he wondered what his own career would look like once he finally got free of Custer.
He’d said the right thing. Custer nodded. “Only one I can think of is Wilhelm I, Kaiser Bill’s grandfather. He fought under Napoleon—imagine it!—and he was still German Kaiser when I licked Gordon in 1881, and for six or seven more years after that, too. He was up over ninety when he finally gave up the ghost.”
“That’s…quite something, sir.” Dowling could easily imagine Custer up over ninety. He wouldn’t go till they came and dragged him away—and neither would Libbie, come to that.
And now Custer was scheming again. “A brass band in every town, that damn Red told me,” he said. “I’ll take him up on it, too—and if he thinks I aim to head straight south for the border from here, he can damn well think again, and so can Upton goddamn Sinclair. I aim to have the bulliest farewell tour in the history of the world.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, knowing full well who would have to plan that tour.
“A good morning to you, Arthur,” Wilfred Rokeby said as Arthur McGregor walked into the post office in Rosenfeld, Manitoba.
“Morning to you, too, Wilf,” McGregor answered. He thrust a hand into the pocket of his overalls. Coins jingled. “Need to buy a mess of stamps.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Rokeby said. “This have to do with Julia and Ted Culligan? Congratulations. I expect they’ll be happy together.”
“Hope so,” McGregor said. “The Culligans are nice folks, and Julia’s so happy, she thinks she invented Ted. If she still feels that way ten years from now, they’ll have done it up right. For now, though, Maude and me, we’ve got invitations to write.”
“You can have some of your kinfolk come out here for a change,” Rokeby said, “instead of you going back to Ontario.”
“That’s right,” McGregor said. Since he hadn’t been in Ontario as Rokeby thought, that was liable to get awkward, but he figured he could slide through it. And he wasn’t about to give the postmaster any hint that he’d actually been in Winnipeg. He didn’t think Wilf Rokeby told the Yanks things they didn’t need to know, but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.
He bought a dollar’s worth of stamps, about as many as he’d bought at one crack in his life. “Thank you kindly,” Wilfred Rokeby said. Maybe because McGregor had been such a good customer, he slid a copy of the Rosenfeld Register across the counter to him. “You can have this, too, if you like. I’m done with it.”
“Thanks, Wilf. That’s nice of you.” Because an American was putting out the new Register, McGregor didn’t like to buy it. He’d read it, though, if he got the chance. As it had in the old days, the Register reserved the top right part of the front page for important news from out of town. The headline leaped out at McGregor. He pointed to it. “So Custer’s finally going back to the USA, is he? Good riddance.” He didn’t mind saying that to the postmaster; most Canadians would likely have said worse.
Rokeby nodded so emphatically, a lock of hair flopped down on his forehead despite the spicy-scented oil he used to plaster it down. The smell of that hair oil was to McGregor, as to other folks for miles around Rosenfeld, part of the odor of the post office.
“He’s celebrating more triumphs than imperial Caesar while he’s doing it, too,” Rokeby said. “Just have a look at the story there.”
McGregor did. The more he read, the longer his face got. “He’ll be parading through every town where his train stops?” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “He doesn’t think he’s imperial Caesar, Wilf. He thinks he’s God Almighty.”
“He’s a vain old man,” the postmaster said. “Pretty soon he’ll meet God Almighty face-to-face, and I guarantee you’ll be able to tell the difference between the two of them.”
“That’s the truth,” McGregor said. Had he had any luck at all, the devil would already be roasting Custer over a slow fire. He wondered if Custer would parade through Rosenfeld on his way back to the United States, and made a silent vow: if the American general came into town, he wouldn’t go out again.
Wilfred Rokeby sighed. “Wish to Jesus I could go back to selling stamps with the portrait of the King, God bless him, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. You have to get along the best way the big fish let you if you’re only a little fish yourself.”
“I suppose you’re right,” McGregor said. The big fish—the big Yank fish—hadn’t let him get along. But he could still bite. He’d show them he could still bite. His features revealed none of that. Nodding to the postmaster, he went on, “Thanks for the stamps, and thanks for the paper, too.”
“Any time, Arthur,” Rokeby said. “And congratulations again for your daughter. She’s a nice gal; I’ve always thought so. She deserves to be happy.”
She’d have been a lot happier if the Yanks hadn’t come up over the border. But McGregor kept that to himself. He’d kept a lot of things to himself since Alexander was shot. With a last nod to the postmaster, he headed across the street to Henry Gibbon’s general store.
Snow crunched under his boots. The calendar said it would be spring any day, but the calendar didn’t know much about Manitoba. As he walked, he thought hard. If Custer came to Rosenfeld…If Custer paraded through Rosenfeld…If he did, McGregor was going to try to kill him, and that was all there was to it.
He could see only one way to do it: toss a bomb into Custer’s motorcar. That was how the Serbs had touched off the Great War. McGregor couldn’t see doing it and getting away with it. The prospect of not getting away with it had held him back in the past. He looked deep into himself. No, he really didn’t care any more. If he paid with his life, he paid with his life. He’d never have the chance to strike another blow like this against the Yanks. The next commandant they appointed would probably be some faceless functionary whose own mother had never heard of him. If someone like that got blown to smithereens, so what? But Custer had been famous for more than forty years. Killing him would mean something. The USA didn’t have an Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but Custer came close.
Murder on his mind, McGregor walked right past the general store. He turned around, shaking his head, and went back. Henry Gibbon nodded from behind the counter. “Morning, Arthur,” he said. “What can I do for you today?”
“I’ve got a list here somewhere,” McGregor said, and went through his pockets till he found it. Handing it to the storekeeper, he went on, “It’s Maude’s stuff, mostly: canned goods and sundries and such. We need kerosene, too, and there’s a couple of bottles of cattle drench on there for me, but it’s mostly for the missus.”
Gibbon ran his finger down the list. “Reckon I can take care of just about all of this.” He looked up. “Hear tell your daughter’s going to tie the knot. That’s a big day, by heaven. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Henry,” McGregor said. He pointed to Gibbon. “I bet the Culligans came into town in the last couple of days. Mercy, even Wilf Rokeby’s heard the news.”
“You know it’s all over creation if Wilf’s heard it, and that’s a fact,” Henry Gibbon said with a chuckle. He turned to the shelves behind him. “This’ll take a little bit. Why don’t you grab a candy cane—or a pickle, if one’d suit you better—and toast yourself by the stove while I rustle up what you need?”
“I don’t mind if I do.” McGregor reached into the pickle barrel and pulled a likely one out of the brine. It crunched when he bit into it, the way a proper pickle should.
“I’m going to give you a crate,” Gibbon said. “Bring it back and I’ll knock a dime off your next bill.”
“All right. I would have brought one with me this time, only I didn’t think.”
“I noticed that. It’s why I started knocking a dime off the bill,” the storekeeper answered. “Plenty of people who won’t think about anything else will remember money.”
McGregor would have been one of those people before the Great War. He would have been one of those people up until 1916. Now the only thing he remembered was revenge. “What do I owe you?” he asked when Gibbon set the last can in the crate.
“Well, when you bring in the kerosene can and I fill it, everything put all together comes to $8.51,” Gibbon said. “You did bring the kerosene can, I reckon?” By his tone, he reckoned no such thing.
“Yeah, I did.” McGregor shook his head in dull embarrassment. “Lucky I remembered to hitch the horse to the wagon. I’ll go get the can.”
“You’d have been a mite longer getting here, Arthur, if you’d forgotten about the horse,” McGregor called after him as he left.
He didn’t answer. He would have walked back to the wagon for the kerosene can before going to the general store had Rokeby not given him a copy of the Register. Seeing that Custer was leaving Canada, seeing that Custer was going to celebrate while here, realizing that Custer might come through Rosenfeld, had taken everything else from his mind. He wanted to go back to the farm. He wanted to go back into the barn and get to work on a bomb he could throw.
He would have forgotten the crate of groceries had Henry Gibbon not reminded him of it. The storekeeper laughed as he carried it out toward the wagon. McGregor was glad he didn’t own an automobile. He wasn’t altogether sure he recalled how to get back to the farmhouse. The horse, thank heaven, would know the way.
When he carried the crate indoors, the Rosenfeld Register was stuck on top of the cans and jars. Naturally, Maude grabbed it; new things to read didn’t come to the farm often enough. As naturally, McGregor’s wife noticed the story about Custer right away. “Is he going to parade through Rosenfeld?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” McGregor answered.
“If he does parade through Rosenfeld, what will you do?” Sharp fear rode Maude’s voice.
“I don’t know that, either,” McGregor answered.
Maude set a hand on his arm. His eyes widened a little; the two of them seldom touched, except by accident, outside the marriage bed. “I don’t want to be a widow, Arthur,” she said quietly. “I’ve already lost Alexander. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, too.”
“I’ve always been careful, haven’t I?” he said, coming as close as he ever did to talking about what he did besides farming.
“You go on being careful, do you hear me?” Maude said. “You’ve done what you had to do. If you do anything more, it’s over and above. You don’t need to do it, not for me, not for Alexander.” She wasn’t usually so direct, either.
“I hear you,” McGregor said, and said no more. He was the only one who could judge what he had to do. He was the only one who could judge how much revenge was enough for him. Now, he was the only one who could judge how much revenge was enough for Alexander. As far as he was concerned, he might kill every Yank north of the border without it being revenge enough for Alexander.
“Maybe he won’t come through Rosenfeld,” Maude said. Did she sound hopeful? Without a doubt, she did.
“Maybe he won’t,” McGregor said. “But maybe he will, too. And even if he doesn’t, don’t you think the newspapers will print where he’s going to be and when he’s going to be there? If he’s having parades, he’ll want people to turn out. I suppose I can go meet him somewhere else if I have to.”
“You don’t have to,” Maude said, as she had done before. “Will you please listen to me? You don’t have to, not any more.”
“Do you think Mary would say the same thing?” McGregor asked.
Maude’s lips shaped two silent words. McGregor thought they were Damn you. He’d never heard her curse aloud in all the years he’d known her. He still hadn’t, but only by the thinnest of margins. When she did speak aloud, she said, “Mary is a little girl. She doesn’t understand that dying is forever.”
“She’s not so little any more, and if she doesn’t understand that after the Yanks murdered Alexander, when do you suppose she will?” McGregor asked.
Maude spun away from him and covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook with sobs. McGregor stamped past her, back out into the cold. When he strode into the barn, the horse snorted, as if surprised to see him again so soon.
He didn’t pick up the old wagon wheel and get out the bomb-making tools he hid beneath it. Time enough for that later, when he knew exactly what sort of bomb he needed to build and where he’d have to take it. For now, he just stood there and looked. Even that made him feel better. Slowly, he nodded. In a sense more important than the literal, he knew where he was going again.
Colonel Irving Morrell slammed his fist against the steel side of the test-model barrel. “It’s not right, God damn it,” he ground out. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in such a temper. When the doctors said his leg wound might keep him from going back to active duty in the early days of the Great War? Maybe not even then.
“What can we do, sir?” Lieutenant Elijah Jenkins said. “We’re only soldiers. We haven’t got anything to do with deciding which way the country goes.”
“And I’ve always thought that was how things should be, too,” Morrell answered. “But when this chowderhead—no, this custardhead—of a Socialist does something like this…I ask you, Lije, doesn’t it stick in your craw, too?”
“Of course it does, sir,” Jenkins said. “It’s not like I voted for the Red son of a bitch—uh, beg pardon.”
“Don’t bother,” Morrell said savagely. “That’s what Upton Sinclair is, all right: a Red son of a bitch.” He seldom swore; he was not a man who let his feelings run away with his wits. Today, though, he made an exception. “That he should have the gall to propose canceling the rest of the reparations the Rebs still owe us—”
“That’s pretty low, all right, sir,” Jenkins agreed, “especially after everything we went through to make the CSA have to cough up.”
But he’d put his finger on only part of Morrell’s fury. “Giving up the reparations is bad enough by itself,” Morrell said. “But he wants to throw them away—however many millions or billions of dollars that is—and he won’t spend the thousands here to build a proper prototype and get the new-model barrel a step closer to production.”
“That’s pretty damn stupid, all right,” Jenkins said. “If the Rebs can start putting money in their own pockets again instead of in ours, they’ll be spoiling for a fight faster than you can say Jack Robinson.”
“That’s the truth,” Morrell said. “That’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Why can’t Sinclair see it? You can’t get along with somebody who’s bound and determined not to get along with you.” He did his best to look on the bright side of things: “Maybe Congress will say no.”
“Socialist majority in each house.” Jenkins’voice was gloomy. He kicked at the dirt. “After the Confederates licked us in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War, they weren’t dumb enough to try and make friends with us. They knew damn well we weren’t their friends. Why can’t we figure out they aren’t our friends, either?”
“Why? Because workers all across the world have more in common with other workers than they do with other people in their own country.” Morrell wasn’t usually so sarcastic, but he wasn’t usually so irate, either. “What happened in 1914 sure proved that, didn’t it? None of the workers would shoot at any of the other workers, would they? That’s why we didn’t have a war, isn’t it?”
“If we didn’t have a war, sir, where’d you get that Purple Heart?” Jenkins asked.
“Must have fallen from the sky,” Morrell answered. “Pity it couldn’t have fallen where Sinclair could see it and have some idea of what it meant.”
“Why don’t you send it to him, sir?” Jenkins asked eagerly.
“If I did, I’d have to send it in a chamber pot to show him how I felt,” Morrell said. “And I’ll bet I could fill that chamber pot with medals from men on just this base, too.” For a moment, the idea of doing just that held a potent appeal. But then, reluctantly, he shook his head. “It wouldn’t do. I’d throw my own career in the pot along with the medal, and somebody has to defend the United States, even if Sinclair isn’t up to the job.”
“Yes, sir, I suppose so.” Jenkins was a bright lad; he could see the sense in that. He was still not very far from being a lad in the literal sense of the word, though, for his grin had a distinct small-boy quality to it as he went on, “It would have been fun to see the look on his face when he opened it, though.”
“Well, maybe it would.” Morrell laughed. He knew damn well it would. He slapped Jenkins on the back. “See you in the morning.” Jenkins nodded and hurried away toward the officers’ club, no doubt to have a drink or two or three before supper. In his bachelor days, Morrell might—probably would—have followed him, even if he would have been sure to stop after the second drink. Now, though, he was more than content to hurry home to Agnes.
She greeted him with a chicken stew and indignation: she’d heard the news about Sinclair’s proposal to end reparations down in Leavenworth. “It’s a disgrace,” she said, “nothing but a disgrace. He’ll throw money down the drain, but he won’t do anything to keep the country strong.”
“I said the same thing not an hour ago,” Morrell said. “One of the reasons I love you is, we think the same way.”
“We certainly do: you think you love me, and I think I love you,” Agnes said. Morrell snorted. His wife went on, “Would you like some more dumplings?”
“I sure would,” he answered, “but I’ll have to run them off one day before too long.” He still wasn’t close to fat—he didn’t think he’d ever be fat the way, say, General Custer’s adjutant was fat—but now, for the first time in his life, he wondered if he’d stay scrawny forever. Agnes’ determination to put meat on his bones was starting to have some effect. He was also past thirty, which meant the meat he put on had an easier time sticking.
“You served under General Custer,” Agnes said a little later. With a mouth full of dumpling, Morrell could only nod. His wife continued, “What do you think about him taking a tour through Canada before he finally comes home for good?”
After swallowing, Morrell said, “I don’t begrudge it to him, if that’s what you mean. He did better up there than I thought he would, and he’s the one who really broke the stalemate in the Great War when he saw what barrels could do and rammed it down Philadelphia’s throat. He may be a vain old man, but he’s earned his vanity.”
“When you’re as old as he is, you’ll have earned the right to be just as vain,” Agnes declared.
Morrell tried to imagine himself in the early 1970s. He couldn’t do it. The reach was too far; he couldn’t guess what that distant future time would be like. He couldn’t guess what he’d be like, either. He could see forty ahead, and even fifty. But eighty and beyond? He wondered if anybody in his family had ever lived to be eighty. He couldn’t think of anyone except possibly one great-uncle.
He said, “I hope I don’t have the chance to get that vain, because I’d need another war, maybe another couple of wars, to come close to doing all the things Custer’s done.”
“In that case, I don’t want you to get old and vain, either,” Agnes said at once. “As long as you have the chance to get old, you can stay modest, for all of me.”
“I suppose that will do,” Morrell answered. Agnes smiled, thinking he’d agreed with her. And so he had…to a point. Old men, veterans of the War of Secession, talked about seeing the elephant. He’d seen the elephant, and all the horror it left in its wake. It was horror; he recognized as much. But he’d never felt more intensely alive than during those three years of war. The game was most worth playing when his life lay on the line. Nothing felt better than betting it—and winning.
He had a scarred hollow in the flesh of his thigh to remind him how close he’d come to betting it and losing. Agnes had a scarred hollow in her heart: Gregory Hill, her first husband, had laid his life on the life—and lost it. Morrell knew he ought to pray with all his heart that war never visited the borders of the United States again. He did pray that war never visited again. Well, most of him did, anyhow.
The next morning, he put on a pair of overalls and joined the rest of the crew of the test model in tearing down the barrel’s engine. They would have done that in the field, too, with less leisure and fewer tools. The better a crew kept a barrel going, the less time the machine spent behind the lines and useless.
Morrell liked tinkering with mechanical things. Unlike the fluid world of war, repairs had straight answers. If you found what was wrong and fixed it, the machine would work every time. It didn’t fight back and try to impose its own will—even if it did seem that way sometimes.
Michael Pound looked at the battered engine and sadly shook his head. “Ridden hard and put away wet,” was the gunner’s verdict.
“That’s about the size of it, Sergeant,” Morrell agreed. “It does a reasonably good job of making a White truck go. Trying to move this baby, though, it’s underpowered and overstrained.”
“We ought to build something bigger and stronger, then,” Pound said. “Have you got the three-sixteenths wrench, sir?”
“Matter of fact, I do.” Morrell passed it to him. He grinned while he did it. “You always make everything sound so easy, Sergeant—as if there weren’t any steps between we ought to and doing something.”
“Well, there shouldn’t be,” Pound said matter-of-factly. “If something needs doing, you go ahead and do it. What else?” He stared at Morrell with wide blue eyes. In his world, no steps lay between needing and doing. Morrell envied him.
Izzy Applebaum, the barrel’s driver, laughed at Pound. “Things aren’t that simple, Sarge,” he said in purest New York. His eyes were narrow and dark and constantly moving, now here, now there, now somewhere else.
“Why ever not?” Pound asked in honest surprise. “Don’t you think this barrel needs a stronger engine? If it does, we ought to build one. How complicated is that?” He attacked the crankcase with the wrench. It yielded to his straightforward assault.
Morrell wished all problems yielded to straightforward assault. “Some people don’t want us to put any money at all in barrels,” he pointed out, “let alone into better engines for them.”
“Those people are fools, sir,” Pound answered. “If they’re not fools, they’re knaves. Hang a few of them and the rest will quiet down soon enough.”
“Tempting, ain’t it?” Izzy Applebaum said with another laugh. “Only trouble is, they make lists of people who ought to get hanged, too, and we’re on ’em. The company’s better on their list than on ours, but none of them lists is any goddamn good. My folks were on the Czar’s list before they got the hell out of Poland.”
“Down south of us, the Freedom Party is making lists of people to hang,” Morrell added. “I don’t care for it, either.”
Michael Pound was unperturbed. “Well, but they’re a pack of wild-eyed fanatics, sir,” he said. “Go ahead and tell me you don’t think there are some people who’d be better off dead.”
“It is tempting,” Morrell admitted. He had his mental list, starting with several leading Socialist politicians. But, as Applebaum had said, he was on their list, too. “If you ask me, it’s just as well nobody hangs anybody till a court says it’s the right and proper thing to do.”
“Have it your way, sir,” Pound said with a broad-shouldered shrug, and then, a moment later, another one. “It’s the law of the land, I suppose. But if I were king—”
“If you was king, I’d get the hell out of here faster than my old man got out of Poland,” Izzy Abblebaum broke in.
The gunner looked aggrieved. He no doubt thought he’d make a good king. He’d done a fine job of commanding one barrel after Morrell got “killed.” That didn’t mean he could run roughshod over the world leading a brigade of them, even if he thought it did. Checking a gasket, Morrell reflected that nobody could do too much roughshod running in the USA; the Constitution kept such things from happening. If it sometimes left him frustrated…he’d just have to live with it. “This lifter is shot,” he said. “We have a spare part?”
“With this budget?” Applebaum said. “Are you kidding? We’re lucky we’ve got the one that doesn’t work.” Morrell spent a long time pondering that, and never did straighten it out.
Nellie Jacobs felt harassed. Once Edna got Merle Grimes to pop the question, she hadn’t wasted a minute. She’d said, “I do,” and moved out. That meant Nellie had to try to run the coffeehouse and keep track of Clara—who at two was into everything—all by herself. Either one of those would have been a full-time job. Trying to do both at once left her shellshocked.
Every once in a while, when things got more impossible than usual, she’d take Clara across the street to Hal’s shop to let her husband keep track of the kid in between half-soling shoes and occasionally making fancy boots. On those days, she ended up tired and Hal exhausted instead of the other way round.
“Now I know why God fixed it up so that young people have most of the babies,” she groaned after one particularly wearing day. “Folks our age don’t have the gumption to keep up with ’em.”
“I wish I could tell you you were wrong,” Hal answered. He looked more like a tired grandfather than a father. He wasn’t Nellie’s age; he was better than ten years older. Having Clara around seemed to be making both her parents older still at a faster rate than usual.
“Shall I make us some more coffee?” Nellie asked. “It’s either that or prop my eyelids up with toothpicks, I reckon.”
“Go ahead and make it,” Hal said. “You always make good coffee. But I do not think it will keep me awake. I do not think anything will keep me awake, not any more.” He sighed. “And she sleeps through the night so well now, too.”
“I know.” Nellie would have groaned again, but lacked the energy. “If she didn’t, I wouldn’t just be tired—I’d be dead.”
“I do love her—with all my heart I love her,” Hal said. “But you are right—she can be a handful. Two handfuls, even. I will be very glad when she stops saying no to everything we tell her.”
“You mean they stop saying no?” Nellie exclaimed in surprise more or less mock. “Hard to tell, if you go by Edna.”
“Edna is fine,” Hal said. “There is nothing wrong with Edna. You worry about her too much.”
“I don’t think so,” Nellie said in a flat voice. “If you knew what I’ve been through—if you knew what I’ve put myself through for her…”
“They are not the same thing,” Hal said.
“Huh!” was the only answer Nellie gave to that. After a while, she went on, “Merle’s going to find out about Nicholas Kincaid. You wait and see. That kind of thing won’t stay under the rug.”
Her husband shrugged. “You are probably right. I cannot blame Edna for not wanting to talk about it, though.”
“Not fair to tell lies,” Nellie said. Then she remembered Bill Reach, almost five years dead now. She remembered how the knife had felt going into him. And she remembered Hal could not, must not, find out how he’d died. The only difference between her case and her daughter’s was that she had a better chance of keeping her secret.
“It is not a lie that intends to hurt,” Hal said, and Nellie had to nod, for that was true. She let him win the argument, which she didn’t always do by any means.
The next morning, the past rose up and bit her. She should have expected such a thing, but somehow she hadn’t. A ruddy, handsome fellow in an expensive suit came in, looked around, and said, “Well, you’ve done the place up right nice, Widow Semphroch. Likely looked like a tornado went through it at the end of the war, but you’ve done it up right nice.” His Confederate accent was thick enough to slice—she guessed he hailed from Alabama, or maybe Mississippi.
“Should I know you, sir?” she asked, her voice cool but resolutely polite: business wasn’t so good that she could afford to anger any customer, even a Rebel.
“Name’s Alderford, ma’am—Camp Hill Alderford, major, CSA, retired,” he answered. “You might not recognize me out of uniform, and I used to wear a little chin beard I’ve shaved off on account of I’ve gotten a lot grayer since the war. But I had some of my best times in Washington right here in this coffeehouse, and that’s a fact. Now that I’m in town again, I figured I’d stop by and see if you and the place made it through in one piece. Right glad you did.”
“Thank you.” Nellie didn’t remember him at all. A lot of Confederate officers had spent a lot of time in the coffeehouse. She wondered if more of them would start paying visits. If they do, they’d better have U.S. money, she thought. Since she didn’t want this one to go without spending some cash, she said, “Now that you’re back in town, Mr. Alderford, what can I get you?”
“Cup of coffee and a ham sandwich,” he answered. He must have been thinking along with her, for he added, “I won’t pay in scrip, and I won’t pay with Confederate banknotes, either.”
“All right.” She got him what he’d ordered. While she was serving him, she asked, “What are you doing in Washington now?”
“Selling cottonseed oil, ma’am, cottonseed oil and cottonseed cake,” Alderford said. “Cottonseed oil brings a dollar a gallon, near enough—a U.S. dollar, I mean, and a U.S. dollar brings enough Confederate dollars to choke a mule. Two mules, even.” He bit into his sandwich. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. You always had good grub here, even when things were lean.”
That was to keep you Rebs coming in so I could spy on you. Nellie almost said it aloud, to see the look on his face. Reluctantly, she kept quiet. Word would get around, down in the CSA. If more ex-officers stopped by, she wanted them in a mood to spend money, not to burn down the coffeehouse.
Clara had been amusing herself in what had been a storeroom before Nellie filled it with toys and a cot to keep the toddler either busy or resting. Camp Hill Alderford smiled to see her. “That your granddaughter, ma’am?” he asked. “Reckon your pretty daughter found somebody else after what happened to poor Nick. That was a hard day, a powerful hard day.”
“Mama,” Clara said, and ran to Nellie. She was shy of strangers, especially men with their deep voices.
Alderford’s eyebrows rose. Nellie nodded. “She’s my daughter, too,” she said. “I got married again after the war.” And I got a surprise not so long after I did. “And yes, Edna finally did get married, just a few months ago.” She started to add that Merle Grimes was a veteran, too, but didn’t bother. Men of the proper age who weren’t veterans were few and far between.
“Well, I’m happy for you,” Alderford said. He beckoned to Clara with a crooked index finger. “Come here, sweetheart. I’ve got a present for you.”
“You can go to him, Clara,” Nellie said. But Clara didn’t want to go anywhere. She clung to Nellie’s skirt with one hand. The thumb of the other was in her mouth.
“Here, I’ll give it to your mama,” Camp Hill Alderford told her. She watched with round eyes as he reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet, and extracted a brown Confederate banknote. “Here y’are, ma’am.”
It was beautifully printed: more handsome than U.S. paper money. That wasn’t what made Nellie gape. She’d never seen, never imagined, a $50,000,000 bill. Gasping a little, she asked, “What’s this worth in real money?”
“About a dime.” Alderford shrugged. “Five cents next week, a penny the week after that.” He paused. “Maybe we’ll be able to start setting our house in order again if we get to stop sending you-all reparations. If we don’t, Lord knows what we’ll do.”
“I haven’t got anything to do with that,” Nellie said. She hoped Congress wouldn’t let President Sinclair cut off Confederate reparations. As far as she was concerned, the weaker the Rebs stayed, the better. What was the first thing they were likely to do if they ever got strong again? As far as she could see, head straight for Washington was the best bet.
“I know you don’t,” Camp Hill Alderford answered. He held out his cup. “If you’d fill that up for me, I’d be obliged.”
“I sure will,” Nellie said, and did, after detaching Clara from her skirt. Alderford was the only customer in the place; of course she’d get another nickel out of him. She kept looking at all the zeros on the bill he’d given her for Clara. A sigh escaped her. If only it were U.S. green instead of C.S. brown!
The bell above the door chimed. Nellie looked that way with a smile of greeting on her face—someone else to spend money. But it wasn’t: it was her son-in-law. Alarm ran through her. “Merle!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here this time of day? Why aren’t you at work?” Why did you have to come in when this goddamn Reb’s here?
“Edna just telephoned me from the doctor’s office,” Merle Grimes answered. “Since you don’t have a telephone, I figured I’d come over and tell you the news—you’re going to be a grandmother.”
“Oh,” Nellie said, and then, “Oh,” again. She would have been more excited about the news if she hadn’t been afraid Camp Hill Alderford would start running his mouth. “Won’t you get in trouble for leaving your job in the middle of the morning?” she asked, hoping to get Grimes out of the coffeehouse as fast as she could.
But he shook his head. “My boss said it was all right. We’re pals—we were in the same company during the war. Small world, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t it just?” Nellie said tonelessly.
“Congratulations, ma’am,” Alderford said. He turned to Merle Grimes. “And to you, too, sir. Children make everything worthwhile.”
“Er—thank you,” Grimes said. He couldn’t help realizing Alderford was a Confederate—and probably couldn’t help wondering why a Confederate spoke as if he knew Nellie so well.
Nellie decided to take that bull by the horns: “Mr. Alderford was Major Alderford during the war, and used to stop by here a good deal.”
“Oh,” Grimes said, not in surprise, as Nellie had, but more for the sake of saying something. He had a way of holding his cards close to his chest. Nellie had trouble telling what he was thinking.
“That’s right,” Alderford said. Nellie sent him a look of appeal to keep him from saying any more. She hated that; she hated asking any man for anything. And she feared the ex–Rebel officer wouldn’t even notice, or would notice and decide to pay back some damnyankees for winning the war.
But Alderford never said an untoward word. He set coins—U.S. coins—on the table and went on his way. Nellie let out a quiet sigh of relief. She’d got by with it. But if more Confederates came to visit, could she keep on getting by with it? One more thing to worry about, she thought, as if she didn’t have enough already.
Lucien Galtier reached out and pressed the starter button on the dashboard of his Chevrolet. He’d bought the automobile in large measure because it had a Frenchman’s name on it; a Ford would have been easier to come by.
The engine coughed before coming to noisy life. The motorcar shuddered under him, then settled into a steady vibration different even from the motion of a railroad car, the closest comparison he could find.
His feet were still clumsy on gas and clutch and brake. Charles and Georges had taken to driving more readily than he, which infuriated him. “I will learn to do this, and to do it well,” he muttered. He did not talk to the automobile, as he had to the horse. He was talking only to himself. He knew it, and felt the lack.
He stalled the motorcar the first time he tried to shift from neutral up into low gear. Naturally, Georges had taken the moment before to come out of the barn. As naturally, Lucien’s younger son laughed at his father’s fumbles, and did not even try to keep that laughter to himself. Galtier called the automobile several names he would not have used on the horse even in the worst of moods. Then, still wishing he had not bought the machine, he started it once more and succeeded in driving away.
As he drew near Rivière-du-Loup, he came up behind a horse-drawn wagon—one very much like that which he had driven himself up till a few weeks before. The cursed thing crawled along at a snail’s pace. Galtier squeezed the horn bulb again and again. The stupid farmer sitting up there like a cowflop might have been deaf. He refused either to speed up or to pull over.
At last, seizing an opportunity, Lucien shot around him. “Mauvaise calisse!” he shouted, and eked out the malediction with gestures. The other farmer smiled a smile that, to Galtier, proved his feeblemindedness. “Some people have no consideration,” Galtier fumed. “None whatsoever.” He never once thought how he had behaved when driving a wagon rather than a motorcar.
Traffic in Rivière-du-Loup was far heavier than he recalled from the days before the war. Automobiles had been rare then, with most people traveling by wagon or carriage or on horseback. Now everyone seemed to have a motorcar, and to drive it with a Gallic disdain for consequences that matched Galtier’s own. He cursed. He shouted. He waved his arms. He blew his horn, and blew it and blew it. He fit right in.
Finding a parking space was another adventure, one made worse because the streets of Rivière-du-Loup had not been designed with the automobile in mind. A good many motorcars were parked with two wheels in the road, the other two up on the sidewalks—sidewalks were none too wide, either. At last, Lucien imitated that example.
When he got out, money jingled in his pockets. Some of the coins were from the USA, a few from the Canada of before the war, and some from the Republic of Quebec. As they were all minted to the same standard, merchants took one lot as readily as another. A newsboy was hawking papers on a street corner. Galtier gave him a couple of pennies—one, a U.S. coin, said ONE CENT on the reverse; the other, an issue of Quebec, featured the fleur-de-lys and announced its value as UN SOU—and took a newspaper.
FRANCE IN CHAOS! shouted the headline. He read the accompanying story as he walked back to the automobile. Police and soldiers had turned machine guns on rioters in Paris furious about the worthless currency and about the country’s forced subservience to the German Empire.
The reporter didn’t seem to know what tone to take. Germany was the USA’s ally, and so was also the ally of the Republic of Quebec. But the Quebecois sprang from French stock, and nothing would ever change that. The ambiguity made the writer take almost no tone at all, but set forth what he’d learned from the cable as baldly as if it were going down in a police blotter.
Galtier sighed. He didn’t know how to feel about France’s troubles, either. He wished she were not having such troubles. But if the only way for her not to have troubles was for her to have won the war…Galtier shook his head. “Too high a price to pay,” he murmured.
He would not have said that during the war. He shrugged. He’d had the same thought many times before, in many different contexts. The world had changed, too. Taken all together, the changes pleased him. He would not have said that during the war, either.
When he knocked on the door to the house where Nicole and Leonard O’Doull lived, his daughter answered almost at once. Tagging along behind her was little Lucien. Staring gravely up at Galtier, he asked, “Candy?”
“No, no candy today, I regret,” Galtier answered.
His grandson clouded up and got ready to cry. “You know you aren’t supposed to do that,” Nicole said, and, for a wonder, little Lucien didn’t. Nicole smiled at Galtier. “And what brings you here today, Papa?”
“Nothing much,” he said grandly. “I was just out for a drive in my Chevrolet, and I thought I would stop in.” Was that how a gentleman of leisure should sound? He didn’t know. He’d never met a gentleman of leisure.
“Ah,” Nicole said. “You have the motorcar here, then?”
“Here in Rivière-du-Loup, yes. Here in my pocket”—Galtier peered into it, as if to make sure—“here in my pocket, no.”
Nicole wrinkled her nose. “It certainly isn’t hard to see sometimes where Georges comes by it,” she remarked.
“Comes by what?” Galtier demanded. He was perhaps a sixteenth part as annoyed as he pretended to be.
His daughter knew as much. “Will you let me drive your new motorcar, Papa?” she asked.
“What’s this?” Now Galtier’s surprise was genuine. “How is it that you, a girl, a woman”—he added that last with the air of a man granting a great concession—“can drive a motorcar?”
“Leonard showed me, Papa,” Nicole answered, very much a woman and very much a woman of the new century. “It isn’t very hard. I’ve driven our Ford any number of times. It’s a handy thing to know, don’t you think?”
“What if you have a puncture, and your husband is not there?” Lucien asked.
“I fix it,” she answered calmly. “I’ve done it once. It’s a dirty job, and not an easy job, but I know I can do it again.”
“Do you?” Galtier muttered. Nicole hadn’t yet mentioned her driving to Marie or to Denise. He knew that for a fact. If she had, his wife and his next eldest daughter would have been nagging him to learn to drive, too. With Charles and Georges always wanting to go courting or just gallivanting around in the machine, where would he ever find time to use it himself if his womenfolk were taking it, too?
“Yes, I do.” Nicole answered the question he hadn’t quite aimed at her, and answered it with arrogant confidence a man might have envied. “And so, may I drive your automobile?”
Thus directly confronted, Lucien found no choice but to yield. “Very well,” he said, “but I will thank you to be careful of the delicate machine—and of your delicate father as well.”
Nicole laughed, for all the world as if he’d been joking. She reached down and took little Lucien’s hand; evidently, she was not afraid to trust his life to what she knew behind the steering wheel. Galtier’s heart had not pounded so since the war crossed the St. Lawrence. Nonetheless, he led her to his mechanical pride and joy.
She slid into the driver’s seat, but then stopped in consternation. “Everything is different, Papa!” she exclaimed. “On the Ford, the spark knob is on the left side of the steering column, the throttle on the right. I have a lever on the floor to my left for the emergency brake and clutch release and the pedals on the floor seem different from these, too. On the Ford, they are the high- and low-speed clutch, the reverse pedal, and the foot brake.”
“Here, they are the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal,” Galtier said gravely. “And this lever here shifts the gears. I did not know motorcars were so different, one from another. I do not think you had better drive the Chevrolet after all.”
“I don’t, either.” Nicole looked so unhappy, he reached out and touched her hand. She went on, “Leonard told me Fords were—eccentric was the word he used. I did not know how eccentric they were.” She brightened. “You must teach me to drive this motorcar, too, so I will be able to use whatever sort there is. I already know how to steer; everything else should be easy enough.”
“Should it?” Galtier said. He still found it hard himself; he hadn’t got used to it, as he had to managing a horse. But Nicole seemed to have been driving longer than he had. He wondered why she hadn’t told him. She probably hadn’t wanted him to feel bad when he had no automobile of his own. Maybe she also hadn’t wanted him to know she could do anything so unladylike.
They traded places in the Chevrolet; Nicole took charge of little Lucien. Galtier started the motorcar and bounced it down off the curb and onto the street. “Tell me what you are doing while you do it,” Nicole said. She was trying to watch his hand on the gearshift and his feet on the pedals at the same time.
Galtier did explain as he drove. He thought he might have trouble doing that, but he didn’t. He’d learned so recently, everything was still fresh in his mind, and came bubbling forth like a spring from out of the ground. After a while, he said, “You will want to try for yourself, eh?”
“Of course,” Nicole replied.
And it was indeed of course; Galtier would have been astonished to hear any other answer. He said, “In that case, I will drive out of town before I let you back behind the wheel. Better you should learn where there are fewer targets.”
“The idea, Papa, is to miss the other automobiles and the wagons,” Nicole said.
“Oh, yes. I understand. And the people and the walls, also,” Lucien said. “But if you are learning, you do not yet hold the idea firmly in your mind.” He almost ran down a pedestrian, proving he did not yet hold the idea firmly in his mind, either. The man jumped back and to one side, then shouted angrily at him.
Nicole said nothing at all. She would have been bound to when she was living back at the farm. Has marriage taught her restraint? Galtier wondered. It hadn’t done any such thing for Marie…or had it? Better not to think about that, perhaps.
Once he got out into the countryside again—not a long drive, Rivière-du-Loup being anything but a metropolis—he stopped the Chevrolet, shut off the engine, and got out. Nicole slid slowly and carefully across the front seat to take her place behind the wheel, then, when he got in on the passenger side, handed him little Lucien, who had fallen asleep in her lap. The boy stirred and muttered, but did not wake.
“Now—to start I have only to press this button?” Nicole said, and hit the starter. Sure enough, the engine awoke. “This is easier than with the Ford. Next, I let out the clutch and put the motorcar in gear.” Nicole stalled a couple of times before she managed to get the automobile moving, and her shift from low to second was abrupt enough to wake up Galtier’s grandson, but Galtier praised her anyhow. Why not? He too had stalled, not long before. And she did know how to steer; once she got going, she piloted the Chevrolet with confidence.
“Very good,” Galtier said after she’d churned up dust along several miles of country road. “You were not fooling me after all. You really can drive.”
“Of course I can,” Nicole said. She was shifting gears a bit more smoothly now, learning to ease off the gas pedal as she came down on the clutch. “And this car is easier in nearly every way than Leonard’s Ford. I see no reason at all why Mama and Denise should not also learn.”
“Oh, you don’t?” Galtier said, and Nicole shook her head, defying him to make something of it. She wouldn’t have done that when she was living at home, either. Leonard O’Doull, Lucien thought, kept too loose a rein on her now. But she had shown she could drive. If she could, were Marie and Denise too ignorant? They would never let him forget it if he thought so. With a shrug that made little Lucien giggle, Galtier added, “It could be that you have reason,” and then, “It could even be that I will tell them you have reason.”
“Oh, Papa,” Nicole said fondly, and Galtier was reduced to mumbling. Tabernac! he thought. She is a wife now, and so she sees right through me.
Sylvia Enos didn’t go down to T Wharf nearly so often these days as she had in the past. For one thing, her connections with the fishermen and the folk who worked in the fish markets had slipped with the passage of time. For another, going down to the wharf where George had worked tore open old wounds.
But all her old wounds had been torn open when she found out that that Confederate submersible skipper had fired the torpedo that sank the USS Ericsson. She knew her husband’s killer’s name: Roger Kimball. Even though he’d attacked the U.S. destroyer after the war was over, he still walked free down in the CSA.
President Sinclair had done no more than issue a tepid protest. That ate at Sylvia, too. Lots of people still sang the Socialists’ praises. Sylvia supposed they had done good things for the workers of the USA. But they hadn’t done what she most wanted. Had she had a vote, Upton Sinclair would have lost it.
With the old wounds already bleeding again, going to T Wharf couldn’t make them hurt any worse. After Sylvia got off work from her Saturday half day, she gathered up George, Jr., and Mary Jane and took them down by the sea. They enjoyed it; they kept exclaiming over the raucous gulls and over all the fishing boats tied up to the wharf.
“Sure does stink, Ma,” Mary Jane said, more admiringly than not.
“It’s supposed to smell this way,” Sylvia answered. Tar and salt air, horse manure and old fish—without them, T Wharf would have been a different, a lesser, place.
Seeing the boats made Sylvia want to exclaim, too, but for a different reason from that of her children. The fishing fleet had changed while she wasn’t looking, so to speak. Before the war, most of the boats had been steamers, with some still relying on sail. Now diesel- and gasoline-powered boats were driving steam from the scene. They changed one element of the wharf’s familiar smell, and not to the better in her mind. She far preferred coal smoke to the stink of diesel exhaust.
She walked along the wharf, looking into the boats for men she knew, men from whom she might buy some choice fish before they ever got to market. That sort of business was highly unofficial, but went on all the time. Fishermen needed extra cash in their pockets enough to make them anything but shy about taking it from the pockets of the boat owners.
Sylvia was discovering to her dismay that the fishermen were almost as unfamiliar as the boats they took to sea when, from behind her, someone called, “Mrs. Enos!”
She turned. So did her children. George, Jr., asked, “Who’s the spook, Ma?”
Fortunately, he kept his voice down. “You hush your mouth,” she told him. “Charlie White isn’t a spook; he’s a very nice man. He used to be the cook on the Ripple when your father sailed in her.” She waved to White, who was coming up the wharf toward her. “Hello, Charlie. It’s been a long time. You stayed in the Navy, I see.”
He brushed a hand across the front of his dark blue uniform tunic. “I surely did, Mrs. Enos. Work’s not near as hard, and that’s a fact. In the Navy, all I’ve got to do is cook.” His accent was two parts Boston, one part something that put Sylvia in mind of the CSA. He looked at George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “Good God, but they’ve grown! Fine-looking children, Mrs. Enos.”
“Thank you,” Sylvia said, her voice shaky. Seeing an old friend of her husband’s—and Charlie had been a friend, even if he was colored—here at this place where George had worked left her close to tears.
White solemnly nodded, perhaps understanding some of what was going through her mind. He said, “I was right sorry when I found out George didn’t come home from the war, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” Sylvia said again, even more softly than before. But then fury filled her, and she asked, “Did you find out George was aboard the Ericsson?”
She didn’t have to explain that to the Negro cook. No doubt she wouldn’t have had to explain it to any Navy man. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t know that. I think it’s a crying shame we ain’t going after the dirty rotten coward who sank that ship a…lot harder than we are.”
“So do I,” Sylvia said grimly.
“The president is lily-livered,” Mary Jane declared. She was just echoing her mother, but Sylvia didn’t want her views aired in public. No, on second thought, maybe she did.
“Weren’t a lot of people in the Navy who voted for Sinclair,” Charlie White said. “Must have been an awful lot of people on dry land who did, though.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said. Then she remembered her manners. “How’s your family, Charlie? Everyone well?”
“Sure are, and praise the Lord for that,” the colored man answered. “Got me a new little boy since I saw you last, I think. Eddie’s going to turn two in a couple weeks.”
“Good for you,” Sylvia said. She and George might have had more children by now, if only…She pulled back from that. “What are you doing on T Wharf now?”
“Same thing you are, I bet,” White said: “buying fish. I’m chief cook on the Fort Benton—big armored cruiser. Sailors eat like pigs, you know that?”
“They’re men,” Sylvia said, and Charlie White laughed. Sylvia wasn’t sure she’d said anything funny. Men had appetites; women satisfied them. That was the way the world had always worked. Nobody’d ever bothered asking women what they thought of it. Men had power, too.
“Well, well, what have we got here?” someone said. “Looks like old home week, or I’m a Chinaman.”
Sylvia knew that voice. “Hello, Fred,” she said, turning. “It’s been a while.” Fred Butcher had been first mate aboard the Ripple. When Sylvia got a good look at him, she had to fight to keep her face straight. He was up in his fifties now, and his hair and Kaiser Bill mustache had gone snowy white. He’d put on weight, too, which shocked her even more: he’d always been skinny and quick-moving, like a lizard. Only his eyes, clever and knowing, were as she remembered. Fixing on them let her say, “Good to see you,” and sound as if she meant it.
“Anything I can do for you folks?” Butcher asked, shaking hands with Charlie White. He’d always known the angles; a first mate who didn’t know them couldn’t do his job. “You need fish, talk to me. I’m not going to sea any more; I’m a factor with L.B. Godspeed and Company. If I can’t get it for you better and cheaper than anybody else on T Wharf, I’ll eat my straw boater.”
“That would be funny,” Mary Jane said, and Butcher took off the hat and made as if to do it. She laughed. So did George, Jr.
“Godspeed’s a good outfit,” Charlie White said seriously. “They’ve been in business since not long after the War of Secession, haven’t they?”
“That’s right—used to be called Marston and Company,” Butcher said. “So what can I do for you, Charlie? Cod? Halibut?”
“Five hundred pounds of each, for delivery to the Fort Benton at the Navy Yard,” White said. They haggled hard over the price. White gave Butcher no special deference either because of his race or from old association; business was business.
Sylvia’s children were fidgeting by the time Fred Butcher said, “All right, Charlie; that’s a deal. Jesus, the way you jewed me down, anybody’d reckon you were spending your own money, not Uncle Sam’s.”
“Things are tight these days,” White answered. “My own boss’ll be all over me if I don’t watch every dime.”
“Well, you’ve done that, by God,” Butcher said. “I’m liable to catch the dickens for giving you such a good deal.” Charlie White grinned proudly. Sylvia didn’t believe Butcher for a minute; he’d never hurt himself or his firm. Nodding to her, Butcher asked, “How about you, Mrs. E? You want a thousand pounds of fish, too? I’ll give you the same deal I gave Charlie.” He winked at her.
“Give me the same price per pound for five pounds of good cod as you gave Charlie for five hundred, then,” Sylvia said at once.
Instead of winking, Fred Butcher looked pained. “Come on, Mrs. E, have a heart. He gets a discount for quantity.” Then he seemed to listen to what he’d said a moment before. “All right, already. We won’t go broke over five pounds of cod. Come on down to Number Sixteen and I’ll take care of you. You want to come, too, Charlie, see what you’re getting?”
“You bet I do,” the Negro said. “And if what you deliver ain’t what I see now, Godspeed’ll have some talking to do with the U.S. Navy. Like I say, it’s a good company, but things like that can happen. I want to make sure ahead of time they don’t.”
“I’ll make sure of it,” Butcher promised. Charlie nodded, as if to say he’d check anyway. His ex-shipmate, unfazed, led him and Sylvia and her children along the wharf to Number 16. Sylvia got first choice, and picked a couple of fine young cod. When she started to open her handbag, Butcher waved for her not to bother. “Now that I think about it, these are on the house.”
Sylvia couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d burst into song. “You don’t have to do that, Fred,” she said. “You were doing me a favor when you gave me a good deal. This is too much.”
“No, no, no.” The quick, decisive way Butcher shook his head reminded Sylvia of the dapper man he’d been only a few years before. “I just recalled—George was on the Ericsson, wasn’t he?” He waited for Sylvia to nod, then went on, “Take ’em, then, and don’t say another word about it. Times can’t be easy for you.”
“They aren’t,” Sylvia admitted. “God bless you, Fred.” She dipped her head to Charlie White. “Remember me to your wife, please.” As he promised to do that, she steered her children out of the Godspeed & Co. shop.
“That was nice of that man, Ma,” George, Jr., said.
“He used to sail with your father,” Sylvia answered. “Now we’ll have some good suppers with this fish.” And her budget, which was always tight, would have a little more stretch to it during the coming week. That was as well, because…“There’s one more thing I want to get while we’re out. Come on, you two. We’re going to Abie’s.”
“Hurray!” Sylvia couldn’t tell whether George, Jr., or Mary Jane cheered louder. They both loved going to the pawnshop. Anything in the world—anything from anywhere in the world—was liable to be there. Sylvia remembered seeing a set of false teeth smiling at her from the front window one day. Next to that, who could get excited about something as mundane as a stuffed owl?
Abie Finkelstein, the proprietor of the pawnshop, looked rather like a frog. “Hello, Mrs. Enos,” he said in a thick, not quite German accent. “Vot can I do for you today? If your little children a piece candy from the bowl there on the counter take, I do not think I even notice.” At Sylvia’s nod, George, Jr., and Mary Jane helped themselves. Finkelstein looked a question at Sylvia.
“I don’t want any candy, thanks.” But that wasn’t all of what he’d asked, not even close. She pointed to the items hanging on brackets on the wall behind him. “Let me have that one, please.”
“All right.” He got it down. “Everybody needs these days to be safe.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said. “Everybody does.”