Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  With a grunt, Custer did set the revolver back in the holster, only to yank it out again a moment later. This time, he did point it at Dowling. His adjutant yelped. “Don’t you turn into an old woman on me,” Custer said peevishly. “You never know when an assassin may strike.”

  Dowling couldn’t even tell him that was nonsense, not after the bomb in Winnipeg the summer before, and especially not after Wade Hampton V had been gunned down only a couple of months earlier. Custer’s adjutant did say, “I think you’ll be safe enough in a sleepy little town like Rosenfeld, sir.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Custer sneered. “Have you forgotten that blackguard Arthur McGregor makes his home just outside this sleepy little town?”

  As a matter of fact, Dowling had forgotten that till Custer reminded him of it. “Sir,” Dowling answered, taking a firm grip on his patience, “there really is no evidence this McGregor is a blackguard, or anything but a farmer. The experts are all convinced he’s an innocent man.”

  “Experts?” Custer rolled his rheumy eyes. “The experts were all convinced we should use barrels by dribs and drabs, too. What the devil do experts know, except how to impress other experts?” He holstered the revolver again, then took out the report the experts had compiled on Arthur McGregor and flipped through it till he found a photograph of the man. “Here!” He thrust it at Dowling. “If this isn’t the face of a villain, what is it?”

  Relieved that that miserable pistol wasn’t aimed at his brisket any more, Dowling studied the photograph of McGregor for the first time in several months. He reached the same conclusion now as he had then. “Sir, he just looks like a farmer to me.”

  “Bah!” Custer snatched back the report. “All I can say is, you are no judge of the imprint character makes on physiognomy.”

  All I can say is, you’re an old fraud starting at shadows, Dowling thought. And he couldn’t even say that, not really. Pretty soon, Custer would at last officially step down as the longest-serving soldier in the history of the U.S. Army. And then, perhaps, just perhaps, Abner Dowling would get an assignment where he could use his talents as something other than a nursemaid.

  Iron wheels squealed against iron rails as the train began to slow outside of Rosenfeld. Custer pulled out the revolver yet again. He had the fastest draw Dowling had ever seen in an eighty-two-year-old man. Since he was the only eighty-two-year-old man Dowling had ever seen draw a pistol, that proved less than the tubby lieutenant colonel might have liked.

  Dowling was convinced that, were an assassin lurking in Rosenfeld, Custer was unlikely to hit him with a pistol shot. The retiring general had a far better chance of nailing an innocent bystander or two, or himself, or Dowling. He had a better chance still of forgetting he wore the revolver. But, since no assassin would be lurking, Dowling didn’t have to worry about any of that…too much.

  Libbie Custer ignored them both. She lay in her Pullman berth, gently snoring. She was down with a bad cold, or maybe the grippe. Combined with the medicine she’d taken for it—like most such nostrums, almost as potent as brandy—the sickness had knocked her for a loop. She would not be parading today.

  And now, evidently, Custer had done all the practicing he intended to do. After putting the pistol back into the holster, he clapped on a black felt cocked hat gleaming with gold braid, adjusted it to a jaunty angle with the help of the mirror atop the walnut sideboard, and then turned back to Dowling to ask, “How do I look?”

  “Magnificent,” his adjutant answered. Custer was a spectacle, no two ways about it. He’d always worn a uniform as splendid as regulations allowed, and then a little more besides. Now that no one could possibly criticize him for his outfits, he’d stopped even pretending to pay attention to the regulations. He looked something like a South American emperor, something like God on a particularly tasteless afternoon. Dowling found another fancy word: “Refulgent, sir.”

  “Thank you very much,” Custer said, even though Dowling hadn’t meant it altogether as a compliment. Dowling glanced out the Pullman car’s window. The sun was going in and out behind clouds. With a little luck, the medals and gold cords on Custer’s tunic and the gold stripes down each trouser leg wouldn’t blind too many of the spectators.

  The train pulled into the Rosenfeld station. By this time, the people who formed Custer’s procession worked together as smoothly as circus acrobats, and a good deal more smoothly than most of the forces under his command had done during the Great War. “Here comes your motorcar, sir,” Dowling said as the limousine descended from the flatcar on which it rode.

  “And about time, too,” Custer said—nothing ever satisfied him. He looked around. “What a miserable excuse for a town this is. The only reason I can think of for scheduling a parade through it is that it is on the railroad line.”

  “Do you want to cancel the parade and go on, sir?” Dowling asked. If Custer did that, he’d stop worrying about the bomber who, his adjutant remained sure, was a bomber only in the retiring general’s mind.

  Custer’s mind was certainly full of the fellow. “And let McGregor think he’s frightened me away?” he demanded haughtily. “Never!” He looked around again. “We stopped here once before, didn’t we? On the way up to Winnipeg, I mean. We drove through the streets then, too, and almost ran over some yahoo who’d probably never seen a motorcar before in his life.”

  “Why, so we did, sir.” Dowling had forgotten that. Custer was an old man, but his memory hadn’t slipped. He still vividly recalled slights he’d suffered during the War of Secession, and had never forgotten his quarrels with Teddy Roosevelt during the Second Mexican War—even if TR didn’t remember things the way he did.

  “I thought as much.” Now Custer sounded complacent. He knew his memory still worked, and delighted in showing off. He pulled from a trouser pocket that photograph of Arthur McGregor, which he’d removed from the report. “And if we run into this fellow, I’ll be ready, by thunder.”

  To Dowling’s relief, he didn’t demonstrate his fast draw. By then, the members of the marching band were forming up in front of the Packard limousine. They wore uniforms far more ornate and colorful than those of the platoon of ordinary soldiers who were taking their places behind the automobile, but were moons beside the sun compared to Custer.

  “One good thing,” Custer said as his chauffeur got out of the Packard and opened the door so he and Dowling could go up into the back seat: “at least this will be a short procession. Then I’ll be able to get back to Libbie.”

  He really did love her, Dowling realized with some reluctance. He wasn’t always faithful to her—or, at least, he did his best to be unfaithful when he saw the chance—but she mattered to him. After almost sixty years of marriage, Dowling supposed that was inevitable.

  Dowling sat in the motorcar. Custer stood erect and proud. “Are we ready, Captain?” he called to the bandleader.

  “Let me see, sir.” The young officer checked his watch. “It still lacks a couple of minutes of one, sir.”

  “Very well,” Custer said. “Commence precisely on the hour. Let the people know they can expect absolute certainty from the rule of the United States.”

  Absolute certainty Custer had—enough for a regiment, let alone one man, his adjutant thought. Sometimes that had led to great disasters. Sometimes it had led to great triumphs. It always made the retiring general hard to deal with.

  At one on the dot—or so Dowling assumed, for he did not take his own watch out of his pocket—the bandleader raised his hands. The musicians in his charge struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They began to march. The chauffeur put the limousine in low gear and followed them. Custer’s honor guard, in turn, followed the automobile.

  Rosenfeld might not have been a big city, but people lined both sides of the short, narrow main street to get a good look at General Custer. Some of them applauded the band. That didn’t happen in every Canadian town; sometimes spectators received the U.S. national anthem in stony silence.

  Her
e, though, most of the men and women seemed to accept that they had been conquered and that the United States were here to stay. Dowling saw smiles, he saw waves…and then, beside him, he saw Custer stiffen. “There!” Custer said, his eyes wide. “Right there. That’s McGregor!”

  Dowling’s head swung to the right. He had a brief moment to recognize the Canadian, an even briefer moment to think that, even if McGregor was here, it meant nothing—and then the Canuck threw something in the direction of the motorcar. How embarrassing—he was sure it was his last thought—the old boy was right all along.

  Custer didn’t whip out his pistol, as he’d been practicing. The bomb—Dowling saw the sizzling fuse—flew straight toward him. He caught it as a U.S. footballer might have caught a forward pass, then underhanded it back the way it had come.

  Very clearly, Dowling saw the astonishment on Arthur McGregor’s face. He lacked the time to feel any astonishment of his own. The bomb landed at McGregor’s feet and blew up. Dowling felt a sudden, sharp pain in his left arm. He looked down and discovered he had a torn sleeve and was bleeding.

  So was Custer, from a wound on the outside of his thigh. If he noticed the injury, he gave no sign of it. “Stop the car!” he shouted to the chauffeur, and then, to the soldiers behind him, “See to the wounded.” Now he drew his revolver. “And you and I, Dowling, we shall see to Mr. Arthur McGregor.”

  “I think, sir, you may have done that already.” Dowling was astonished at how steady he sounded. He squeezed the fingers of his left hand. They worked. Like Custer, he’d taken only a minor wound. The men and women standing between McGregor and the motorcar had borne the brunt of the bomb and shielded the Americans from the worst.

  Some of those people were down and screaming and thrashing, blood pouring from them. Blood poured from others, too, men and women who would not get up again. And there, flung against a wall like a bundle of rags, lay Arthur McGregor. His eyes were set and staring, his belly and groin a shredded, gory mass. Custer thrust the pistol back into his holster. “I don’t need this—he did it to himself.”

  “No, sir.” Abner Dowling spoke more humbly than he ever had in his life. “You did it to him. You were ready for anything.”

  Custer shrugged. “He cut his fuse just a bit too long—otherwise, we’d look like that now.” His tone was one of dispassionate criticism of another man’s work. “He had a good run, but no one man can lick the United States of America. Sooner or later, his luck had to give out. And I’ve paid Tom back, too, by God—in person.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dowling said what needed saying: “How does it feel to be a hero—again?”

  Custer drew himself up as straight as he had stood in the limousine. The dramatic pose he struck came straight out of the nineteenth century. “Dowling, it feels bully!”

  Summer in Ontario wouldn’t last much longer. Jonathan Moss knew that very well. Before long, the idea of sitting out on the grass with an attractive woman would have been an absurdity. Better, then, to enjoy such times while they lasted and not to worry about the snow surely only weeks away.

  Laura Secord didn’t make that easy. In all the time he’d known her, Laura Secord had never made anything easy. Now she said, “I wish that brave man had managed to blow your famous General Custer higher than the moon.”

  “I don’t suppose I should be surprised,” Moss answered. “If you want to know what I think, though, somebody who hides bombs or throws them and doesn’t care if he kills innocent bystanders isn’t much of a hero. Pass me that plate of deviled eggs, will you? They’re good.”

  “I’m glad you like them.” But, after she’d passed him the eggs, she returned to the argument: “I think anyone who keeps up the struggle against impossible odds is a hero.”

  “If the odds are impossible, anyone who keeps up the struggle against them is a fool,” Moss returned.

  “Canada still has a few fools left,” Laura Secord said. She leaned forward and picked up a deviled egg herself.

  “One fewer now.” Law school and his practice had sharpened Moss’ wits and made his comebacks quicker than when he’d been here as a pilot.

  “We won’t just turn into pale copies of Americans and of the United States,” Laura said. “We won’t.”

  Moss nodded. “That’s easy enough to say. I don’t know how easy it will be to do. The fellow who threw the bomb at General Custer thought the same way you do. Now he’s dead. There’s no revolution up here. And you’re feeding a Yank a picnic lunch. Have I told you that you make really good pickles?”

  She glared at him. “If you keep going on like this, I won’t ask you to come back.”

  “I’m still not sure I should be coming up here at all,” Moss answered. “For me, coming to picnics with you is what going to an opium den is for somebody who can’t shake the poppy.” He spoke lightly, which didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth.

  Laura Secord raised an eyebrow. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “Probably,” he answered, which startled a laugh out of her. Maybe he would have done better to stay down in Berlin and meet some nice girl there. But he hadn’t met any girls there—or women, either, as Laura was unquestionably a woman—who’d struck his fancy. And so, still with the fragments of what was, without a doubt, an obsession left over from the Great War, he’d started driving up to Arthur. He didn’t know what would come of this. He didn’t know if he wanted anything to come of it.

  She waved her hand, a wave encompassing the farm she’d stubbornly kept going on her own. “I don’t know whether I ought to be inviting you here, either,” she said, her voice troubled. “It feels a lot like giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But you were the one who aided me, after all.” Was she trying to convince herself, as Moss tried to convince himself coming here was all right?

  He said, “I don’t know about aid, but I’m certainly comforted.” He lay back on the grass. A couple of cows grazing twenty or thirty yards away looked at him with their large, dark eyes, then went back to their own lunches. He thumped his belly to show how comforted he was. The waist of his trousers felt pleasantly tight.

  “I’m glad of that.” Laura reached for a pewter pitcher. “More tea?”

  “All right,” Moss answered. “One thing I will say for tea: it makes a better cold drink than coffee does.”

  “It makes a better hot drink than coffee does, too,” she said. Moss shrugged. She made as if to pour the pitcher over his head before filling his tumbler. “You Yanks have no taste.”

  “I suppose not,” he said, watching puffy white clouds drift across the blue sky. The weather wouldn’t stay good that much longer. He thought about how bad it could get. That made him smile, and then laugh.

  “And what’s so funny?” Laura Secord asked. “That you Yanks have no taste?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” He sat up and sipped at the tea she’d given him. “I was just thinking about the snowstorm I drove through three years ago to come up here and visit you. If that doesn’t prove I’ve got no taste, I don’t know what would.”

  She made a face at him. “The only thing it proves is that you’re mad. I’d already had a pretty fair notion of that from the way you behaved during the war.”

  “Mad about you,” he said, which made her blush and look down at the grass. Jonathan Moss knew—had known for years—that was metaphorically true. He’d also wondered a good many times if it was literally true, in the alienist’s use of the word mad.

  “My mad Yank.” Laura Secord spoke with a curious mixture of affection and bemusement. “Till you stood up for that poor fellow done out of his property—done out of the property where you had your office—I didn’t think I should ever want to see you again.”

  Maybe it would have been just as well for both of us if you hadn’t, Moss thought. Here he was, when he would have been almost anywhere else with almost anyone else. All his friends from down in Chicago—a lot of his friends from down in Berlin—would have called him a fool. He called himsel
f a fool a lot of the time. He kept coming back here.

  “Would you like anything else here?” Laura Secord asked him. He finished the glass of tea she’d given him, then shook his head. “All right,” she said, and started loading things back into the picnic hamper. As he always did when he came up to her farm, he tried to help. As she always did, she refused to let him. “You’ll just make a hash of things.”

  “Roast-beef hash, by choice,” Moss said.

  With a snort, Laura got to her feet. Moss stood up, too. As she always did, she consented that he carry the hamper back to the farmhouse. She rubbed that in, too: “I really would have no trouble with it, you know. It’s not nearly as heavy as a bale of hay, and I haul those all the time.”

  “Well, up till you said that, I did feel useful,” Moss confessed. “But don’t worry about it—you’ve cured me.”

  She muttered something under her breath. Moss thought it was Mad Yank again, but couldn’t be sure. She hurried on ahead of him and opened the kitchen door. He set the picnic basket on the counter next to the tin sink, which was full of water. She put the dirty dishes and bowls and glasses in the water, saying with her back to him, “They’ll be frightful to clean if I let them dry.”

  “All right,” he answered; that was also part of her routine.

  When the picnic basket was empty, she turned and took a step toward him. He took a step toward her, too, which brought him close enough to put his arms around her. She was reaching for him, too, her face tilted up, her mouth waiting for his.

  The first time that had happened, he’d taken her right there on the kitchen floor. They’d both been mad then. He was sure he’d hurt her, ramming home like a pile driver, again and again. She hadn’t acted as if it hurt, though. She’d clawed his back to ribbons and yowled like a cat on a back fence and finally screamed out his name loud enough to rattle the windows. She’d gone without for a long time, and had done her best to make up for it all at once.