American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Wordlessly, McGregor took it out of an inside pocket and handed it to him. The farmer had wrapped the pass in waxed paper before setting out for Rosenfeld, knowing he'd need it: the Americans were sticklers for every bit of punctilio they'd set up in the territory they occupied, and people who didn't go along disappeared into jail or sometimes just disappeared, period.

  After carefully inspecting the document, the sentry handed it back. "Awright, go ahead," he said grudgingly, as if disappointed he didn't have an excuse for giving McGregor more trouble. He gestured with his Springfield. Water beaded on the bayonet; he'd done a good job of greasing it to keep it from rusting.

  Rosenfeld's only reason for being was that it lay where an east-west railway line and one that ran north-south merged into a single line heading northeast: in the direction of Winnipeg. Along with the train station, it boasted a general store, a bank, a couple of churches, a livery stable run by the blacksmith (who also did his best to fix motorcars, not that he saw many), a doctor who doubled as a dentist, a weekly newspaper, and a post office. McGregor hitched the horses in front of that last.

  "Shut the door behind you," called Wilfred Rokeby, the postmaster, when McGregor came in. The farmer obeyed, not blaming him a bit: the coal stove made the interior of the post office deliciously warm. McGregor stood dripping on the mat just inside the door for a couple of minutes before going on up to the counter.

  Rokeby nodded in approval. He was a small, fussy man with a thin mustache and with mouse-brown hair parted precisely in the center and held immovably in place by some cinnamon-scented hair oil that always made McGregor think of baked apples. "And what can I do for you today, Arthur?" he asked, as if certain the farmer had something new and exotic in mind.

  McGregor took out another sheet of waxed paper. This one was folded around half a dozen ordinary envelopes. "Want to mail these," he said.

  Rokeby looked pained. He always did, but today more than usual. "They're going to destinations in the occupied zone, I hope?"

  "Can't send 'em anyplace else from here, now can I?" McGregor answered sourly. "Any mail wagon goes from one side of the line to the other, first the Yanks shoot it up and then we do."

  "That is unfortunately correct." The postmaster made it sound as if it were McGregor's fault. He pointed to the envelopes lying on the counter between them. "Those'll have to go through the American military censor before I can send 'em out, you know."

  "Yeah, I'd heard about that." McGregor's expression said what he thought of it, too. "It's all right." He spread the envelopes out fan-fashion so Rokeby could read the addresses on them. "Two to my brothers, two to my sisters and brothers-in-law, two to my cousins, just to let 'em know I'm alive and well, and so is the rest of the family. Censors can read 'em till their eyes cross, far as I'm concerned."

  "All right, Arthur. Wanted to make sure you remembered, is all." Wilfred Rokeby lowered his voice. "The Yanks have arrested more'n a couple of people on account of they were careless about what they put in the mail. Wouldn't want anything like that to happen to you."

  "Thanks," McGregor said gruffly. He dug in his pocket and came out with a handful of change. Setting a dime and two pennies on the counter beside the envelopes, he went on, "Why don't you let me have the stamps for them, then?"

  "I'll do that." The postmaster scooped up the coins and dropped them into the cash box. Then he pulled out a sheet of fifty carmine stamps, tore off a strip of six, and handed them to McGregor. "Here you go."

  "Thanks. I'll-" McGregor took a closer look at the stamps Rokeby had given him. The color wasn't quite right-that was what had first drawn his eye. When he took that closer look, he saw they didn't bear the familiar portrait of King George V, either. They were U.S. stamps, with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on them. On Franklin 's plump face, the phrase Manitoba mil. dist. was overprinted in black ink. "What the devil are these?"

  "The stamps we have to use from now on," Rokeby answered. "Ugly, aren't they? But I don't have a choice about what I sell you: military governor says no mail with the old stamps goes out any more. Penalty for disobeying is… more than you want to think about."

  One after another, mechanically, McGregor separated the stamps from the strip the postmaster had given him, licked them, and stuck them on envelopes. Even the glue tasted wrong, or he thought it did-more bitter than that to which he was accustomed. The taste of occupation, he thought. The U.S. stamps, specially made up for the occupied area hereabouts, brought home to him that the Americans expected to be here a long time in a way nothing else, not even the soldier outside of town, had done.

  He shoved the letters at Rokeby, then turned on his heels and stomped out of the post office without another word. Suddenly the warmth in there felt treacherous, deceptive, as if by being comfortable Rokeby was somehow collaborating with the United States. He knew the idea was absurd, but it wouldn't go away once it occurred to him. The cold, nasty rain that beat in his face when he went outside was a part of his native land, and so seemed oddly cleansing.

  The general store was a couple of doors down. His feet thumped on the boards of the sidewalk. A bell jingled when he went in. Henry Gibbon looked up from a copy of the Rosenfeld Register. He took a pipe out of his mouth, knocked it against an ashtray, and said, "Morning to you, Arthur. Haven't seen you in a while. Everything all right out at your place?"

  "Right enough, anyhow," McGregor answered: a measure of life in wartime. "We didn't get hurt, thank God, and we didn't lose our buildings or too much of the livestock. I've heard of plenty of people who came through worse."

  "That's a fact," the storekeeper said. Henry Gibbon looked like a store keeper: bald and plump and genial, with a big gray mustache hiding most of his upper lip. He wore a white apron, none too clean, over a collarless shirt, a considerable expanse of belly, and black wool trousers. "You got your family, you got your house, you can go on."

  McGregor nodded. He didn't tell Gibbon about how his wife had tried endlessly to get rid of the bloodstains on the floors and walls, or about the chunks of board he'd nailed over dozens of bullet holes to keep out the cold. The farmhouse looked as if it had broken out in pimples.

  "So what can I sell you today?" Gibbon asked. Unlike some storekeepers McGregor had known, he made no bones about being in a business where he gave customers goods in exchange for money.

  "Thing I need most is ten gallons of kerosene," the farmer answered. "Nights are starting to get longer, and they'll be really long pretty soon. I've got plenty of coal laid in for the winter, but lamp oil, now-" He spread his hands.

  Henry Gibbon clicked his tongue between his teeth. "I can give you two gallons, no problem. Anything more than that at one time, or you buyin' more than two gallons a month, and you got to get permission from the Americans in writing." He reached down under the counter and pulled out a set of forms, which he waved in McGregor's face. "I got to account for every drop I sell: when and to who and how much at a time. They're fussy about checkin' on it, too. You don't want to run foul of 'em."

  It was warm inside the store, as it had been in the post office. Again, McGregor had the sense of warmth betraying him. "Two gallons a month, that's not much."

  "It's what I can sell you," Gibbon said. "Arthur, I'd do more if I could, but I got a family. You get in trouble with the Americans, you get in bad trouble." He waved the copy of the Register, much as he had the U.S. forms. Then he pointed to an item and read aloud: "'The U.S. military governor in the town of Morden announces that ten hostages have been taken because of the shooting death of an American soldier. If the perpetrator of this vile and dastardly act of cowardice does not surrender himself to the duly constituted authorities within seventy-two hours of this announcement, the hostages will be executed by firing squad.' "

  "Let me see that!" McGregor said. He'd paid little attention to the town weekly since the American tide rolled over this part of Manitoba. Now he got a good look at how things had changed since the occupation.

  Oh, not e
verything was different from what it had been. Local stores still advertised on the front page of the Register, as they had for as long as Malachi Stubing had been publishing it-and through the tenures of two other publishers before him. He still announced local births and marriages. Farmers still plunked down money to tout the service of their stallions and jackasses, with the invariable ten-dollar fee and the phrase "Colt to stand and walk." If the foal was stillborn, the fee was waived. McGregor had put a good many such notices in the paper over the years.

  Some of the death notices were as they'd always been: Mary Lancaster, age 71, beloved mother, grandmother; Georgi Pasternak, age 9 months, at home with the angels. But a good many bore familiar names gone at un expected ages: Burton Wheeler, 19 years old; Paul Fletcher, age 20; Joe Teague, 18. None of those gave the least hint how the young men had died.

  Another story listed men known to be prisoners of war, and gave their kin instructions on how to send them packages. "All parcels are subject to search," it warned. "Any found containing contraband of any description will result in the addressee's forfeiting all rights to receive future parcels."

  That blunt warning took McGregor to the columns of small print that covered the broader world. And there, most of all, that world might have turned upside down with the arrival of the Americans. Suddenly Germany became the trusted ally, England and France the hated foes. The German failure in front of Paris was glossed over as a small setback, and much made of the victory the Kaiser's forces had won over Russians poking their noses into eastern Prussia.

  As far as the Register was concerned, the United States could do no wrong, though each story did bear the disclaimer, furnished by the American Military Information Bureau. If you believed what you read, the Yanks were in Winnipeg, in Toronto, and bombarding Montreal and Quebec City, to say nothing of the triumphs they'd won against the Confederacy and the victories their Atlantic Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet had gained over the Royal Navy and its French and Confederate allies.

  McGregor set the Register back on the counter. "What do you think of all this?" he asked Henry Gibbon.

  The storekeeper paused before he spoke. "Well, the paper it's on is pretty thin now," he said at last. "That makes it better for wipin' your ass than it used to be."

  McGregor stared at him, then chuckled, down deep in his throat. "I don't expect the American Military Information Board'd like that answer, Henry."

  "Give me a penny and I'll care a cent's worth," Gibbon answered. This time, both men laughed.

  "Come on, you damn nigger, shake a leg!" the lieutenant shouted, a silver bar gleaming on each shoulder strap. "You think we've got all day to unload this stuff? Get your lazy, stinking black ass in gear, or you'll be sorry you were ever born, and you can take that to the bank."

  "I'm comin', sir, fast as I can," Cincinnatus answered. He walked onto the barge, threw a hundred-pound sack of corn onto his shoulder, and carried it to the waiting motor truck. The truck rocked on its springs as he tossed the sack on top of the others already in the cargo bed.

  "Faster, dammit!" the lieutenant screamed, setting a hand on the grip of his pistol. He clapped the other hand to his forehead, and almost knocked the green-gray cap off his head. "Jesus Christ, no wonder the stinking Rebs go on about niggers the way they do."

  Cincinnatus would have liked to see the lieutenant haul as much as he was hauling, or even half as much. The noisy little peckerwood ofay'd fall over dead. But he had the gun, and he had the rest of the U.S. Army behind him, and so Cincinnatus didn't see that he had much choice about doing what he was told.

  He had no great love for the whites for whom he'd laboured here in Covington. They'd told the truth about one thing, though: he didn't get better treatment now that the United States was running the town than he had when the Stars and Bars flew here. Some ways, things were worse. The whites who lived in Covington-Tom Kennedy came to mind-dealt with Negroes every day and were used to them. A lot of the soldiers from the United States — this buckra lieutenant surely among them-had never set eyes on a black man before they invaded the Confederacy. They treated Negroes like mules, or maybe like steam engines.

  Another grunt, another sack of grain on his shoulder, another walk to the truck. The lieutenant shouted at him every inch of the way. No, you didn't cuss a steam engine the way that fellow cussed Cincinnatus. The Negro couldn't figure out whether the U.S. soldier blamed him for being black or for being the reason the South had broken away from the United States. He didn't think the lieutenant knew, or cared. The man could abuse him with impunity, and he did.

  "Once we win here, we'll ship all you nigger bastards back to Africa," he said, sounding ready, willing, and able to pilot the boat himself.

  Sensibly, Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut. Even if he hadn't had a lot of schooling, though, he could do arithmetic better than that damnfool lieutenant. There were something like ten million Negroes in the Confederate States. That made for a lot of boat trips back and forth across the ocean. For that matter, the USA hadn't shipped its own Negroes back to Africa. If they weren't there any more, whom would the white folks have left to despise?

  At last, the back of the truck was full. Cincinnatus picked up a galvanized bucket, drank some water, and poured the rest over his head. The lieutenant glowered at him, but let him do it. Maybe he'd convinced the fellow he really was working.

  A white man, a U.S. soldier, drove away in the truck. "I could do that, suh," Cincinnatus told the lieutenant. "You could use your boys for nothin' but fightin' then."

  "No," the lieutenant barked, and Cincinnatus shut up again. If the damnyankee wanted to be stupid, that was his lookout.

  But the damnyankees weren't stupid, not in everything, and you were in trouble if you didn't remember that. The railroad bridge and the highway bridge over the Ohio had crashed into the water as soon as the war started, blown up by Confederate sappers to keep U.S. troops from using them. The Yankee bombardment had done a lot of damage to the Covington docks and, when invasion looked imminent, the Confederates had done a lot more, again to keep the United States from gaining a military advantage. When Cincinnatus came out of the storm cellar of his house after the Confederate army retreated southward and the artillery fire tapered off, he was horrified at the devastation all around.

  Things still looked like hell. The fires were out, yes, but every third build ing, or so it seemed, was either wrecked or had a hole bitten out of it. You didn't want to walk down the street without shoes; you'd slice your feet to ribbons on the knife-sharp shards of glass that sparkled like diamonds in the sun and were sometimes drifted inches deep.

  None of that had kept U.S. forces from exploiting Covington once they'd seized it. Not one but two railroad bridges and one for wagons and trucks came down from Ohio now; they were pontoon bridges that blocked the river to water traffic, but the damnyankees didn't seem to care about that. And the docks had got back in working order faster than Cincinnatus had imagined possible. Barges and ferries-anything that would float-worked alongside the bridges in moving men and materiel down toward the fighting. The U.S. Army engineers knew what they were doing, no two ways about that.

  Cincinnatus sighed. If the damnyankees had done as well dealing with the people of Covington as they had with transportation into and out of the place, everybody would have been better off. Nobody, though, had taught them the first thing about how to engineer human beings, and they weren't good at it. This damn lieutenant was a case in point.

  He screamed at Cincinnatus and the rest of the Negroes doing stevedore work on the docks from the minute they got there to the minute they left. And he didn't just hate Negroes; whenever he had to deal with the white Southerner, he was every bit as bad.

  When the owner of a livery stable complained about having had some horses requisitioned without getting paid for them, the lieutenant told him, "What you need isn't money or horses; it's the horsewhip, nothing else but. You damned traitor, you're dealing with the United States of America n
ow, not your Rebel government. You'd better walk small or you'll be sorry. We're back now, and we're going to stay, and if you don't like it, you can jump in the river for all I care."

  The livery stable man walked off. If looks could have killed, the lieutenant would have been the one in the Ohio, floating face down. Cincinnatus whispered to another black man working alongside him: "My mama always did say you catch mo' flies with honey than with vinegar."

  "My mama say the same thing," the other Negro answered, also in a low voice. "That buckra there, though, I bet he don't have no mama." He dropped his voice even further. "An' he sure don't know who his papa was."

  Cincinnatus laughed at that, loud enough to make the lieutenant glare at him. But he was working, and working hard, so the little man in the green-gray uniform went off to shout at somebody else.

  When sunset came, the men on the docks lined up to get their pay. Armed guards stood around the paymaster to make sure nobody tried redistributing the wealth on his own. "Name," said the paymaster, a middle-aged white man with sergeant's stripes on his sleeves.

  "Agamemnon," said the Negro in front of Cincinnatus.

  The paymaster handed him a green-gray U.S. dollar bill. Covington was a border town, so some of those bills, along with U.S. coins, circulated here all the time. Now, though, the brown Confederate banknotes were no longer legal tender in areas the United States controlled. Till that moment, Cincinnatus hadn't noticed how each side's paper money matched its army uniform.

  "Name?" the paymaster asked him.

  "Cincinnatus," he answered.

  "No." Shaking his head, the paymaster pointed across the Ohio River. " Cincinnati 's over there." He chuckled. Cincinnatus smiled back. It wasn't the worst joke in the world, even if he heard it at least once a week. And the white sergeant didn't seem to have a chip on his shoulder, the way most damnyankees did. The fellow checked his name off on the list in front of him, then handed him a dollar and a fifty-cent piece. "Lieutenant Kennan says you get a hard-work bonus."