Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, shut up, you miserable dyke,” Clarence Smoot muttered, loud enough for Mary but not for the matron to hear. The lawyer raised his voice then: “Shall we talk about your chances, Mrs. Pomeroy?”

  “Have I got any?” Mary asked bleakly.

  “Well . . . you may,” Smoot said, fiddling with the knot on his gaudy necktie. “They can’t prove you blew up Laura Moss and her little girl. They may think so”—and they may be right, too, Mary thought—“but they can’t prove it. All they can prove is that you had explosives when they caught you, and that those explosives were well hidden. You won’t get away with saying you were going to blow up stumps or anything like that.”

  “They won’t listen to me no matter what I say.” Mary was more nearly resigned than bitter. “I’m Arthur McGregor’s daughter and I’m Alexander McGregor’s sister. And now they’ve got me.”

  “They may not apply the maximum penalty—”

  “Shoot me, you mean.”

  Clarence Smoot looked pained. “Well, yes.” But you don’t have to come right out and say it, his attitude suggested. “Colonel Colby is a fairly reasonable man, for a military judge.”

  “Oh, boy!” Mary put in.

  “He is,” Smoot insisted. “Compared to some of the Tartars they’ve got . . .” His shudder made his jowls wobble. “If you throw yourself on the mercy of the court, I think he’d be glad enough to let you live.”

  “In jail for the rest of my life?” Mary said. Reluctantly, Smoot nodded. She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’d sooner they gave me a blindfold and got it over with.”

  “Are you sure?” Smoot asked. “Do you want your husband to have to bury you? Do you want your mother and your husband and your sister and your son to have to go to the funeral? If you do, you’ll be able to get what you want. I don’t think there’s any doubt of that.”

  Mary winced. He was hitting below the belt. Alec was too little to understand what all this meant. His mother was in a wooden box and they were putting her in the ground forever? That would have to be a bad dream, except it wouldn’t be. It would be real, and when he grew up he would hardly remember her.

  But some things were more important. If she’d thought they would let her out one day before too long, she might have weakened. With nothing but endless years in a cell as an alternative, though . . . “My brother didn’t beg. My father didn’t beg. I’ll be damned if I’m going to.”

  Clarence Smoot exhaled heavily and lit a cigarette. “You don’t give me much to work with, Mrs. Pomeroy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Then she shook her head again. “I’m sorry they caught me. That’s the only thing I’m sorry for. They’ve got no business being here. You’ve got no business being here. You’re a Yank, eh? You talk like one.”

  “I’m from Wisconsin. Up till now, I didn’t know that made me a bad person.” Smoot’s voice was dry. He eyed her. “Would you rather have a Canadian lawyer bumping up against an American military judge? I don’t think that would do you an awful lot of good, but you can probably find one.”

  “What I want . . .” Mary took a deep breath. “What I want is for all you Yanks to get out of Canada and leave us alone to mind our own business. That’s what I’ve wanted since 1914.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pomeroy, but that’s not going to happen. It’s way too late to even worry about it,” Clarence Smoot said. “We’re not going to go away. And the reason we won’t is that you wouldn’t mind your own business if we did. You’d start playing footsie with the Confederates or England or Japan, and you’d make all kinds of trouble for us. We don’t aim to let that happen.”

  “Can you blame us?” Mary exclaimed. “After everything the United States have done to my country, can you blame us?”

  Smoot spread his pudgy hands. He wore a wedding ring; Mary hoped he wasn’t married to a Canadian woman. “Whether I can blame you doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whether the United States are going to take that kind of chance . . . well, they won’t, so there’s no point even thinking about it.”

  That was how a Yank would think. Before Mary could tell him so, the matron stuck her formidable face into the room and said, “Time’s up.”

  Mary’s time nearly was up. She felt it very strongly. Smoot said, “We’ll do the best we can at your hearing. The less you say, the better your chances. I can see that plain as day.”

  In tramped the guards. They didn’t point their rifles at Mary this time, but they looked as if they were just about to. “When I say that’s it, that’s it,” the matron barked, her voice almost as deep as Smoot’s.

  “Take it easy, Ilse,” the lawyer said soothingly. But the matron wasn’t inclined to take it easy. She jerked a muscular thumb toward the door. Mary got up and went. If she hadn’t, the matron would have made her pay for it—oh, not right there where Smoot could see, but later on. The food would be worse, or Mary wouldn’t get to bathe, or maybe the matron would just come in and thump her. She didn’t know what would happen, only that it wouldn’t be good.

  They took her to the hearing in an armored personnel carrier, a snorting monster of a vehicle only one step this side of a barrel. If they had to use it here, they weren’t using it against their foreign enemies. That consoled her a little—as much as anything could.

  Colonel Colby was a Yank in a uniform. That was all that registered on her at first. Another, younger, Yank, a captain named Fitzwilliams, prosecuted her. He laid out what her family connections were. Clarence Smoot objected. “Irrelevant and immaterial,” he said.

  “Overruled,” the military judge said. “This establishes motive.” The worst of it was, Mary knew he wasn’t wrong. She hated the Yanks for what they’d done to her country and what they’d done to her family.

  Captain Fitzwilliams set out the case linking her to the bombing at Karamanlides’ general store (she thought they’d forgotten all about that one) and to the one that killed Laura and Dorothy Moss. Smoot objected to that, too. “The only kind of evidence you’ve got is the testimony of a man who is obviously biased,” he insisted.

  “Why obviously?” Fitzwilliams asked. “Because he doesn’t agree with you? It doesn’t matter much anyhow. She was caught with explosives in the barn on the farm where her mother lived. Bomb-making is—and should be—a capital crime all by itself. The other charges are icing on the cake.” By the pained way Smoot grunted, he knew that only too well.

  “Does the defendant have anything to say in mitigation or extenuation?” the judge asked. He sounded as if he hoped she did. That surprised her. As Clarence Smoot had said, he wasn’t a monster, only a man doing his job.

  Smoot nudged Mary. “This is your chance,” he whispered. “Think of your little boy.”

  She hated him then, for trying to deflect her from what she intended to do. She had to steel herself to tell the judge, “No. I did what I did, and you’ll do what you do. If you think I love my country any less than you love yours, you’re wrong.”

  Colonel Colby looked at her. “A plea for mercy might affect the verdict this court hands down.” It wasn’t that he wanted her to beg. He wanted her to live.

  “You can give me the same mercy you showed Alexander,” she said.

  The military judge sighed. “Why do you want to martyr yourself? It won’t change anything one way or the other.”

  “You have no right to be here. You have no right to try me,” Mary said.

  “We have the best right of all: we won,” Colby said. “If your side had, would you have been gentle to the United States? I doubt it.” Mary hadn’t even thought about that. It didn’t worry her, either. Colby let out a long, sad sigh. “I have no choice but to pronounce you guilty, Mrs. Pomeroy. The punishment for the infraction is death by firing squad.”

  “We will appeal, your Honor,” Smoot said quickly.

  “No.” Mary overruled him, or tried to.

  “An appeal in a capital case is automatic,” Colby told her. “Part of me hopes I will be overruled. I must say, though,
I don’t expect to be.”

  They took Mary back to her cell. They allowed her no visitors. That was more a relief than a torment. She didn’t want to see Mort, and she especially didn’t want to see Alec. He might have made her weaken. She didn’t think she could stand that, not when she’d come so far.

  Colonel Colby knew what he was talking about. The appeal was denied. The panel that heard it ordered the sentence carried out, and so it was, on a sunny day with spring in the air. Mary knew she should have been afraid when they tied her to the pole, but she wasn’t.

  They offered her a blindfold. She shook her head, saying, “This is for Canada. I’ll take it with my eyes open.”

  A minister prayed. She wondered why the Yanks had him here when they were doing something so ungodly. An officer commanded the men in the squad: “Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!” The noise was shattering. So was the impact. And then it was over.

  ****

  Guards at the Andersonville prison camp often let U.S. POWs see Confederate papers. Sometimes they would offer their own editorial comments, too. They jeered whenever the CSA did something good. If the USA scored a success, it never showed up in the news in the Confederate States.

  The guards also jeered at what they called U.S. atrocities. “Look at this here,” one of them said, waving a newspaper at Major Jonathan Moss. “Now you people are shooting women up in Canada.”

  Moss glared at him. “Are you going to let me see it, or are you just going to flap it in my face?” The guard blinked, then handed him the paper, which came from Atlanta. Where Confederate newspapers came from hardly mattered. They all had the same stories in them: whatever the Freedom Party wanted the Confederate people to hear.

  Moss read the story. The way the reporter told it, Mary Pomeroy was a martyr whose like the world hadn’t seen since St. Sebastian. That the damnyankees alleged she’d blown up a woman and a little girl in Berlin, Ontario, only proved what a pack of liars and murderers came out of the United States.

  So the reporter said, anyhow. It proved something different to Jonathan Moss. He thrust the paper under his arm without a word. “Well?” the Confederate asked him. “What have you got to say about that there?”

  “She had it coming.” Moss’ voice was hard and flat.

  The guard gaped at him. “How can even a damnyankee say such a heartless thing as that?”

  “Because she murdered my wife and my daughter, you cracker son of a bitch.” Moss braced himself. If the guard wanted to mop the floor with him, he could. The fellow was bigger than he was and only half his age—and carried a submachine gun besides.

  But the guard’s gape only got wider. “She killed—your kinfolk?” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears.

  “That’s what I told you,” Moss answered. “It’s the God’s truth, too. If she hadn’t done that, I’d probably still be up in Canada. I’d be a damn sight happier than I am now, too. I wish I’d been up there even now. I’d have stood in that firing squad. I’d have pulled that trigger. You bet your life I would have.”

  He wondered if the guard would call him heartless again. The man didn’t. He just went off shaking his head. That’ll teach you to wave a newspaper in somebody’s face, you know-nothing bastard, Moss thought savagely.

  He was avenged. After a couple of years without any movement, he’d doubted he ever would be. And so? he wondered. Was he any happier because this woman was dead? He would gladly have killed her, yes, but was he happier? Slowly, he shook his head. That wasn’t the right word. He’d never be happy, not thinking of Laura and Dorothy dead. But he had a sense of satisfaction he hadn’t known before. It would have to do.

  Of course it will, you fool. It’s all you’ll ever get. His wife and his daughter wouldn’t come back. And neither would the woman who’d sent them the bomb. From what the Confederate newspaper said, she had a husband and a little boy. They’d miss her the way he missed his wife and daughter. There was no end to this. Try as you would to find one, there wasn’t any.

  He read the story over and over. Rosenfeld, Manitoba . . . That rang a bell. He nodded to himself. Wasn’t that where that fellow tried to blow up General Custer and ended up blowing himself up instead? Moss was pretty sure it was, though it had happened almost twenty years earlier. Was this gal any relation to that bomber? He didn’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t Pomeroy. But then, the woman was married, and the paper didn’t say anything about her maiden name.

  It wouldn’t. If she was related to the other Rosenfeld bomber, that would make her a murderer from a family of murderers. Somebody like that wouldn’t draw sympathy even from the Confederates. And so, if it was true, the C.S. propaganda machine just ignored it.

  Here came that guard again. He had another one in tow. The second man, as Jonathan saw when he got closer, was an officer. He strode up to Moss. “What’s this I hear?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Moss answered. “What do you hear?”

  “Conley here tells me you’re related to the people this woman the Yankees shot is alleged to have blown up.”

  “Alleged?” The word made Moss furious. “I heard the explosion. I saw the building—and some of the other people she hurt while they were getting out. I buried what was left of my wife and little girl. Don’t you talk to me about alleged, goddammit.”

  The guard officer gave back a pace. He hadn’t expected such vehemence. Well, too bad for him, Moss thought. Weakly, he said, “How do you know she really did it?”

  “I don’t know for sure.” Now Moss did some paper-waving of his own. “But I’m a lawyer. It sure looks beyond a reasonable doubt to me.”

  “A lawyer? How’d you get captured? Couldn’t run away fast enough?” The officer laughed at his own wit.

  “I’m a fighter pilot. I fought at the front line or on your side of it,” Moss answered coldly. “I wasn’t making like a hero in a prison camp hundreds of miles away.” The guard officer retreated in disorder.

  Moss started to throw the Atlanta paper to the ground, then checked himself. It might not be anything he’d wanted to keep—he had his vengeance, and now he knew it, but the price he’d paid!—but that didn’t mean the paper was useless. Torn into strips, it would come in handy at the latrine trenches.

  He didn’t intend to say anything about the story to his fellow POWs. It was none of their business. But either the guard who’d given him the paper or the officer he’d routed must have blabbed, for the other prisoners found out about it even though he kept his mouth shut.

  Every so often, one of them would come up to him, clap him on the back, and say something like, “You got your own back. That’s good.”

  They meant well. He knew as much. That didn’t keep him from losing patience. Finally, after about the fourth time it happened, he snapped. “What do you mean, got my own back?” he growled at a luckless first lieutenant. “If I had my own back, I’d still be married. I’d still have my little girl. And I’d probably still be up in Canada.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the lieutenant said stiffly, and he retreated as fast as the Confederate guard officer had. After that, fewer prisoners sounded sympathetic, which suited Moss fine.

  In fact, fewer prisoners wanted anything to do with him. That also suited him fine—till he got a summons from the senior U.S. officer, a colonel named Monty Summers. “See here, Moss,” he said, “no man is an island.”

  “Sir, isn’t it a little early in the morning for John Donne?” Moss asked.

  “It’s never too early for the truth,” Summers said, which proved he’d never been a lawyer. “We don’t want you solitary. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for the camp, either.”

  “I’ll worry about me, sir,” Moss said, “and the camp can take care of itself, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Summers snorted in exasperation. He was a corn-fed Midwesterner who’d been captured in Ohio when the war was new. He had sandy hair going gray, ruddy cheeks, blue eyes, and a rock of a
chin that he stuck out whenever he wanted to make a point. He stuck it out now. “You haven’t got the right attitude,” he said.

  “Sorry, sir,” said Moss, who wasn’t. “It’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “Well, you’d damn well better change it.” Summers sounded as if that were as easy as changing a flat tire. He aimed his chin at Moss again. “We’re still in the war. We’re still fighting the Confederates. We’re all in this together. We’re a team, dammit. And you let the team down if you don’t play along. Don’t you want to help drive these fucking goons nuts?”

  “Well . . .” Moss nodded. “All right, Colonel. Maybe you’ve got a point.”

  “You’d better believe I have,” Summer said. “If we weren’t all on the ball, for instance, we’d have Confederate spies raising all kinds of trouble.”

  “How do you know we don’t?” Moss asked.

  “There are ways.” The senior U.S. officer spoke with assurance. “There are ways, but they don’t work unless everybody’s on the ball. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Moss said.

  “All right, then.” Monty Summers’ nod seemed amiable enough. “I won’t say anything more about it, then. A word to the wise, you know.” He seemed to like other people’s distilled wisdom.

  Moss went on much as he had before—but not quite. He’d never been a back-slapping gladhander. He never would be, either. But he did try to stop making his fellow captives actively dislike him. They seemed willing enough to meet him halfway. He started hearing more camp gossip, which gave him something to chew on, if nothing else.

  Nick Cantarella sidled up to him one warm spring morning. “How you doing, Major?” he asked.

  “Not too bad,” Moss answered. “How’s yourself?”

  “I’ve been worse. Of course, I’ve been better, too. This isn’t exactly my favorite place,” Cantarella said.

  “I wouldn’t come here on vacation, either,” Moss said, and Cantarella laughed. Moss added, “The only people who like it here are the guards. They’re too dumb not to—and they get to carry guns, but nobody’s going to shoot back at them.” He was thinking of the officer he’d routed. Cantarella laughed again, even more appreciatively this time. Moss started to laugh, too, but swallowed the noise in a hurry. Captain Cantarella was somehow involved in escape plans—if there were any escape plans to be involved in. As casually as Moss could, he asked, “What is your favorite place?”