“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.” Morr
ell 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…”
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