American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "It did not jam much-not too much," the other woman answered. "Some nights, I think it has the Devil in it, but tonight it was not bad." She patted her lustrous black hair. Instead of cutting it short, as most of the women at the factory did, she wore it under a hairnet to keep it from getting caught in the machinery.

  "That's something, anyway," Sylvia said, though what the label-gluing machine did on one shift was no guarantee of what it would do on the next. For the moment, as shifts changed all through the canning plant, the produc tion line was quiet.

  "Your husband, he is well?" Elena asked.

  "As far as I know, yes," Sylvia said. "But his boat put to sea again three nights ago, so I won't know for certain till they come back from the trip." And if something did go wrong, she wouldn't know till days, maybe weeks, passed. Dead? Captured? She'd been through the agony of wondering once; she didn't know if she could stand to go through it again.

  The Portuguese woman made the sign of the cross. "I pray for him, as I do for my own husband."

  "Thank you," Sylvia said, as she had to Brigid Coneval. "How's your Pedro?" Elena Gomes' husband was in the Army, somewhere out in the South west. "Have you heard from him lately?"

  "I got a letter yesterday, thank God," Elena said. "They are moving farther into Texas, to a town called — " She frowned. "Lummox? Is that right?"

  " Lubbock, I think." Sylvia remembered seeing the name in the newspaper. "I'm glad he's all right."

  "Oh, so am I," the other woman replied. "He says they are thinking of making him a corporal. He talks it down: he says it is only because — again, thank God-he has stayed alive. But I can tell he is proud of it. Still, it is noth ing like what your George has done. To be one of the crew that sank a submarine-" Her eyes glowed.

  What George had had to say about that was that the Spray had gone to sea with a big sink me! sign painted on the cabin, and that the Confederate submarine had thought it was part of the free-lunch spread at a saloon. He didn't think being a decoy was worth getting as excited over as the papers had gone and done.

  Before Sylvia found a way to put any of that into words, the conveyor belt gave a couple of jerks. She knew what that meant — it would start up in earnest in a minute or two. Elena Gomes understood that, too. "I am going to go home and try to get some sleep," she said with a wan smile, "so I can come back tonight and do the same thing all over again. Such is life." She hurried away.

  Such is life, Sylvia thought: drudgery, exhaustion, never enough money, never the time to lift up your head and look around. Wasn't it last week she'd had George, Jr., the day before yesterday she'd given birth to Mary Jane? If it wasn't, where had the time gone? How had it slipped past her? She hadn't even been working then-if, that is, you didn't call raising children work. People who didn't have to do it didn't think it was, which, as far as she was concerned, only showed how little they knew. Or maybe they thought it wasn't work because women didn't get paid for it. That was nothing but more foolishness.

  With a clatter, the conveyor belt got rolling in earnest. Sylvia thought, The trouble with this job is that I don't get paid… enough. If she'd been a man, she would have made more money. Then again, if she'd been a man, she probably would have been in the armed forces by now. Soldiers and sailors didn't get paid much, either, and the things they did…

  She remembered George talking about the torpedo that had slammed into the Confederate submersible. "It was there," he'd said, "and then it was in two pieces, sinking. Nobody had a chance to get out." He'd known some pride in being part of the ambush that sank it, but also a sailor's horror of watching any vessel go to the bottom.

  She pulled the levers on her machine. As Elena had said, it was behaving pretty well. When the paste reservoir ran low, she poured more into it from a big bucket that sat by her feet. She had to keep an eye on the labels, too, to make sure the machine didn't run out of them. She'd let the feeder go empty once, and had the foreman screaming at her because unlabeled cans were go ing down the line. She never wanted that to happen again.

  She ate dinner with Isabella Antonelli, whose husband had been a fisherman and these days was fighting somewhere up in Quebec. "He say they going to do something big," she told Sylvia. "What it is, I don' know. The — how you say? — the censor, he scratch out so much, I cannot tell what his big thing is gonna be."

  "I hope he'll be all right," Sylvia answered, not knowing what else to say. Isabella nodded and then started complaining about her machine, which fas tened strips of tinned steel into cylinders that would be soldered to make the bodies of cans. If half of what she said was true, it made the labeling machine a delight by comparison. But she liked to complain, so who could guess whether half was true?

  When she finally slowed down about the machine, she said, "Your hus band, he's a hero. You don't get no extra money for that, so you no have-a to work here?"

  "I wish I did," Sylvia said. "But what I really wish is that we weren't at war at all, so he could just catch fish and make a living and we wouldn't have to worry about anything else. I wish we never had the war."

  "So do I," Isabella Antonelli said. "But we have it. What can you do?"

  "Nothing," Sylvia answered bleakly. "Nothing at all." She gulped her cold coffee and went back to work.

  Behind Lucien Galtier, a motorized rumble and rattle and racket grew rapidly. He paid it no mind, clucking to his horse and saying, "In a little while, we shall be at Riviere-du-Loup. No point in hurrying on such a fine day — I am certain you agree." If the horse disagreed, it didn't tell him so.

  Brakes squealed. Lucien did not look back over his shoulder. Then he heard the raucous squawk of a horn's rubber bulb as it was vigorously squeezed again and again. Through those squawks, an American bellowed at him: "Get out of the road, you goddamn stinking Canuck, or we'll run you down!"

  Now Galtier did look back. Sure enough, he was holding up a convoy of big, snorting White trucks, all of them painted the green-gray of the U.S. uniform. "I am desolate," he said, dropping the reins so he could spread his hands in apology. "I did not know you were there."

  The driver of the lead truck shook a fist at him through the dust-streaked windscreen. "Get the hell out of the road," he shouted again, "or we won't know you're there."

  Lucien fumbled as he picked up the reins, which made the driver start squeezing that rubber bulb again. Lucien tipped his hat to show he did at last hear, then guided the wagon onto the verge to let the truck convoy pass. Delay ing things any longer, he calculated, would be more dangerous than enjoyable.

  Truck after truck roared past, gears clashing as drivers upshifted for better speed. The noise of the growling engines was appalling. So was the dust the trucks kicked up from the road. The horse snorted indignantly and twitched its ears, as if blaming Lucien for the gray, choking cloud that enveloped them. "I am sorry," Lucien told the animal. "We would have had the same trouble had we pulled off right away." The horse looked unconvinced. So did the chickens in the slotted crates in the back of the wagon; they squawked almost as loud as the truck horn and flapped their wings in a vain effort to escape. Galtier wasted little sympathy on them, not when they were bound for the stew pot or the roasting pan.

  He counted the trucks that passed him, noting how many carried men and how many supplies. Having done that, he laughed at himself. The army stint he'd put in had trained him well: when in contact with the enemy, gather intel ligence. The only problem with that was, he had nowhere to convey the intelligence he'd gathered. And even if he had known to whom to convey it, how much good would that have done him? Anyone on this side of the St. Lawrence would have needed a wireless set to pass the information on to where it might do some good. He knew no one with such exotic equipment.

  Dust from the trucks hung in the air when he got back onto the road and headed up toward Riviere-du-Loup once more. Before he got to town, he had to pull off again to let another convoy pass him. As he had with the first one, he waited to the last possible moment and then a coupl
e of moments more, forcing the whole convoy to slow down to a horse's walking speed before fi nally noticing the trucks were there and getting out of their way.

  "How much good does this do, do you think?" he asked the horse when they started traveling again, after the curses of the U.S. drivers finished wash ing over him. "This getting them angry and giving them a couple of minutes' delay, is it worthwhile?"

  Again, the horse did not answer. He got the distinct impression the horse did not care, although the animal had no great use for trucks whether delayed or rolling past. Foolish beast, he thought.

  As he drew near Riviere-du-Loup, the wagon rolled through an enormous U.S. encampment: more tents than he had ever imagined, and he was familiar with tents. Soldiers bustled about, doing soldierly things. But for the color of their uniforms and the fact that their brand of soldiers' slang had no French in it, they might have been the sons of the men with whom he had served a gen eration before.

  Up near the river, artillery pieces squatted like long-necked, dangerous beasts. Some of them were big, six- or eight-inchers, not just the three-inch popguns that had been here the year before. The Americans could answer warships in kind now. He still remembered the weight of metal the cruiser had been able to hurl at those popguns; thinking about it brought a smile to his lips.

  Out in the river, guns boomed. For a moment, he hoped naval vessels were shelling the camp: it would be a target of the sort about which gunners dreamed. But then he realized it was the battery the Americans had placed on the Isle aux Lievres, the Isle of Hares, out in the St. Lawrence. He wondered if the guns were shooting at ships on the river or at the Canadian and British po sitions on the north bank. Either way, they would miss if God was kind.

  Those guns out on the Isle aux Lievres had shelled the south bank once, after a couple of companies of picked men rowed over from St.-Simeon or somewhere nearby under cover of darkness and wiped out the American garri son. The locals had laughed about that for weeks, even though the soldiers of the British Empire hadn't been able to hold the island against a massive U.S. counterattack.

  Into Riviere-du-Loup Lucien rode, enjoying such summer warmth as Quebec offered. Before he got to the market square, U.S. soldiers not once but twice inspected him, the horse, the wagon, and the chickens he hoped to sell. They didn't turn him back and they didn't demand payment in exchange for letting him go forward, so he supposed he had no real complaint. Maybe they thought he'd hidden a bomb in one of the capons. He thought about making a joke with them about that, but decided not to. They did not look as if they would be amused.

  He found a place to hitch his wagon not far from the Loup-du-Nord. He thought about going in, too, but the place was bustling with soldiers. Neither the idea of good liquor nor that of leering at Angelique and the other bar maids was enough to counterbalance their presence.

  As soon as he had his chickens on display, American soldiers came up and started buying them. The birds mostly went for a couple of dollars apiece; prices had shot up since the Americans came into Quebec, because there was little to buy here. Besides, most of the soldiers knew no more about haggling than they did about archery.

  He soon found one exception to that rule, a small, swarthy man older than the latest class or two of conscripts. Where most of the U.S. soldiers looked like English-speaking Canadians, this one might have been a cousin of Lucien's. He also understood something of bargaining, to Galtier's disappoint ment. He had patience, which most of the Americans signally lacked. "Come on, Antonelli, you gonna stand there all day?" one of his comrades asked. "Buy the damn chicken, already."

  "I'll buy it when this guy here quits trying to steal my money," Antonelli said. He turned back to Galtier. "Awright, you damn thief, I'll give you a dol lar ten for the bird."

  "I steal?" Galtier assumed an injured expression. "I? No, monsieur, you are the thief. Even at a dollar forty, it is for me no bargain."

  He ended up selling Antonelli the hen for a dollar and a quarter. He could have done better by refusing to deal with the American at all and getting more from a less able haggler, but he enjoyed the bargaining enough to make the deal at that price simply for the sake of having met a worthy opponent. Marie, no doubt, would cluck at him when he got back to the farm, but money was not the only thing that brought satisfaction to life.

  When the Americans had snapped up all the chickens he had for sale, he put the crates back in the wagon and then wandered over to the edge of the river. More boats were tied up at the quays below the town than he was used to seeing there. Not all of them were the usual sort of fishing boats and tramp steamers, either. He didn't think he'd ever seen so many barges at Riviere-du- Loup. A lot of them looked new, as if they'd just been put together from green timber and had engines bolted to them. They wouldn't go far or fast. For a moment, he had trouble figuring out why they were there.

  Then he did, and crossed himself. As soon as he'd done that, he looked around to see whether anyone — especially Father Pascal-had noticed. But the priest was nowhere in sight, for which he thanked God. So many men around Riviere-du-Loup, so many barges and boats of all kinds assembled here, could mean only one thing: the Americans were making ready to cross the St. Lawrence and inflict on the rest of Quebec all the delights their rule had brought here.

  "Mauvais chance — bad luck," he murmured under his breath. Too much of France already lay under the boots of the Americans' German allieswould all the French speakers in the world now be occupied and tyrannized? "Prevent it, God," he said quietly.

  He wanted to run to the church, so his prayers would have more effect. But who presided over the church in Riviere-du-Loup? No one other than the odious Father Pascal. To the priest, his own advancement counted for more than the fate of his countrymen. When the day of reckoning came (if God was kind enough to grant such), Father Pascal would have much for which to answer.

  Glumly, Lucien walked to the general store and bought his monthly ration of kerosene with some of the money he'd got from selling the hens. He was pleased by how little he paid for it; compared to other things, it hadn't risen so sharply. It would, he expected, but it hadn't yet. He understood military bureaucracies and how slowly they worked, having been part of one himself, but hadn't expected to be able to turn that to his advantage. With another half-dollar of hen money, he bought hair ribbons in several bright colors for his womenfolk.

  He put the kerosene and the ribbons into the back of the wagon. He was just coming up onto the seat when Angelique came out of the Loup-du-Nord hand in hand with an American soldier. "Look at that little whore," one housewife said to another near Lucien.

  The second woman's claws also came out: "Why doesn't she simply tie a mattress on her back? It would save so much time."

  And then, as if to prove their own virtue and piety, the two of them turned their backs on the barmaid and, noses in the air, strode into the church: Father Pascal's church. Galtier sat scratching his head for a minute or two, then flicked the reins and got the wagon moving. Getting out of Riviere-du-Loup felt more like escape than it ever had before.

  "It is a very strange thing," he told the horse when he was out in open country and could safely have such conversations, "how those women despise Angelique, who at most gives the Americans her body, and think nothing of going in to confess themselves to Father Pascal, who has assuredly sold the Americans his soul. Do you understand this, mon cheval?

  If the horse did understand, it kept its knowledge to itself.

  "Well, I do not understand, either," Lucien said. "It is, to me, a complete and absolute mystery. Soon, though, I shall be home, and then, thank God, I shall have other things to worry about."

  The horse kept walking.

  Nellie Semphroch pasted a sign to the boards that still did duty for her shattered front window: YES, WE HAVE ICED COFFEE. She'd lettered it herself, along with the slogan just below: COME IN amp; TRY IT. IT'S GOOD. With summer's heat and humidity as they were, she would have lost half her business without iced c
offee.

  "Have to go to the bank," she muttered, and then laughed at herself. Banks in Washington, D.C., weren't safe these days. Anyone with any sense kept his money at home or in his store or buried in a tin can in a vacant lot. A robber might take it away from you, but the Army of Northern Virginia might take it away from the bank. The Confederates, from everything she'd seen of them, made the local robbers seem pikers by comparison.

  Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Nellie hadn't heard that sound since the early days of the war, for the Confederates' opening drive had pushed the front too far north for the gunfire to carry. It had returned with the U.S. Army's spring offensive, the breakout from Baltimore. But the breakout, like so many breakouts in the war, had not turned into a breakthrough. The Rebs, though they'd drawn back from Pennsylvania, still held most of Maryland, and U.S. forces were nowhere near ready to regain poor Washington.

  As if to underscore that, a couple of Confederate soldiers came out of Mr. Jacobs' shoemaker's shop across the street, one of them holding a pair of marching boots, the other shiny black cavalry boots. The fellow with the cavalry boots must have told a joke, for the other Reb laughed and made as if to throw half his own footgear at him.

  Nellie ducked back inside the coffeehouse and said, "I'm going over to Mr. Jacobs' for a few minutes, Edna."

  "All right, Ma," her daughter answered from behind the counter. The place was busy — too busy, Nellie hoped, for Edna to get into any mischief while she was gone. Nicholas Kincaid wasn't in there soaking up coffee and mooning over Edna, which Nellie took for a good sign.

  She had to hurry across the street to keep a big truck from running her down. The colored man at the wheel of the truck laughed because he'd made her scramble. She glared at him till the truck turned a corner and went out of sight. She was a white woman. She deserved better treatment from a Negro. But, she reminded herself sadly, she was also a damnyankee, and so deserving of no respect from Confederates, even black ones.