She wondered if that made any sense at all. It must have, for he gave her a brusque nod. “I told you,” he said. “I’m good.”
“Yes.” She nodded back. “You are.” She went back to reading. When she looked up, another forty-five minutes had gone by and she was finished. “You make me sound better and smarter than I am.”
That made him frown. “You should sound the way you are. How do I fix it?”
He was serious. Sylvia laughed and shook her head. “Don’t. I like it.” Ernie still looked discontented. She laughed again. “I like you, too.” She’d never said that before.
“Thanks,” he said, and put the manuscript back into a tidy pile and imprisoned it with rubber bands. “I enjoyed working with you. I think the book will be all right.” By the way he sounded, the second was more important than the first.
Even so, when he headed for the door Sylvia planted herself in front of him, put her arms around him, and gave him a kiss. It was the first time she’d kissed a man, the first time she’d wanted to kiss a man, since she’d kissed George good-bye for the last time during the war.
Ernie kissed her back, too, hard enough to leave her lips feeling bruised. He squeezed her against him, then all at once shoved her away. “It’s no good,” he said. “It’s no damn good at all.”
“Why not?” Sylvia said. “It’s been so long. . . .” Knowing desire had been a delicious surprise. Knowing it, having it stirred, and now having it thwarted seemed more than she could bear.
“Why not, sweetheart? I’ll tell you why not,” the writer answered. “I got shot in Quebec. You know that. You don’t know where. I got shot right there. Not enough left to do a woman any good. Not enough left to do me any good, either.”
“Oh,” Sylvia said. That didn’t seem nearly strong enough. “Oh, hell.”
He looked at her and nodded. “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” The words weren’t quite in his usual style. Maybe he was quoting from something, but Sylvia didn’t recognize it. He bared his teeth in what seemed more snarl than smile. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“You’re sorry?” Sylvia exclaimed. “You poor man!”
That was the wrong thing to say. She realized it as soon as the words were out of her mouth, which was, of course, too late. Ernie set his jaw and glared. No, he wasn’t one to take pity—he’d despise it for weakness, maybe Sylvia’s, more likely his own. “Shouldn’t have messed with you,” he said. “My own stupid fault. I forget every once in a while. Then it tries to wag. Like a goddamn boxer dog wagging his little docked tail. But a boxer can hump your leg. I can’t even do that.” He kissed her again, even harder and rougher than before. Then he walked straight out the door. Over his shoulder, he threw back a last handful of words: “Take care of yourself, kiddo.”
The door slammed. Sylvia burst into tears. “Oh, hell,” she said again. “Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Oh, hell.” She was sure she would never see him again.
She was sure, but she was wrong. One day a couple of weeks later, he waved to her as she came out of her block of flats. She’d never known she could feel joy and fear in the same heartbeat. “Ernie!” she called. “What is it?”
“You have your money in a bank,” he said. That wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “Which bank is it?”
“Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust,” she answered automatically. “Why?”
“I thought I remembered that,” Ernie said. “I saw the passbook on your coffee table. Take the money out. Take it all out. Take it out right away. The bank is going to fail. It will fail very soon.”
Fear of a different sort shot through her. “God bless you,” she whispered. “You’re sure?”
“No, of course not,” he snapped. “I came here because I was guessing. Why else would I come here?”
Sylvia flushed. “I was going somewhere else, but I’ll head over there right now. Thank you, Ernie.”
His face softened, just for a moment. “You’re welcome. Writers find things out. I know someone who works for the bank. Who worked for the bank, I mean. He saw the writing on the wall. He quit. He said anywhere else in the world was better than to be there right now.” He paused and nodded to Sylvia. “Nice to think I can do something for you, anyhow.” Touching a finger to the brim of his sharp new fedora, Ernie hurried away. The crowd on the street swallowed him up.
Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust was only a few blocks away: the main reason Sylvia banked there. She ran almost the whole way. The lines didn’t stretch out the door, as she’d seen at other banks in trouble. But she felt panic in the air when she went inside. Everyone was speaking in the low near-whispers people used when they tried to show they weren’t afraid. She filled out a withdrawal slip and worked her way to the front of the line.
How many lines have I stood in? How many hours of my life have I wasted in them? Too many—I know that.
At last she stood before a teller’s cage, with its frosted glass and iron grillwork. The young man looked very unhappy when he saw the slip. “You want to close out your entire account?” he said in that soft, no-I’m-not-afraid voice.
“That’s right,” Sylvia answered firmly. “You do have the money to cover it?”
The teller flinched. “Yes, we do. We certainly do. Of course we do.”
“Well, then, kindly give it to me,” Sylvia said.
“Yes, ma’am. Please wait here. I’ll be back with it.” The teller disappeared into the bowels of the bank.
Before he returned, an older man stepped into the cage and said, “Ma’am, I want to personally assure you, the Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust is sound.”
“That’s nice,” Sylvia told him. “If it turns out you’re right, maybe I’ll put my money back in. If it turns out you’re wrong, I’ll have the money—if that teller ever gets back. How long is he going to take?”
He chose that moment to return. While the frowning older man looked on, he counted out bills and change for Sylvia. “Here you are, ma’am,” he said. “Every penny that’s owed you.” He sounded as if he were doing her a favor by giving her back the money, and as if she hadn’t done the bank a favor by depositing it there in the first place.
By the time she left, the lines did stretch out the door. “Did you get it?” someone called to her. She didn’t answer; she didn’t want to get mugged when people found out she was carrying cash. She just headed home, as fast as she could.
Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust closed its doors for good the next day.
XII
Mary McGregor went about her chores with a certain somber joy. That had nothing to do with how hard things were on the Manitoba farm where she’d spent her whole life. It had a great deal to do with how hard the market crash had hit the United States. She hardly cared what happened to her, so long as the United States got hurt.
And, by all the signs, the occupiers did hurt. Fewer green-gray U.S. Army motorcars rattled along the road to Rosenfeld that ran past the edge of the farm. Fewer U.S. soldiers prowled the streets of the local market town. And the Rosenfeld Register, published these days by an upstart from Minnesota who used occupation propaganda as filler, kept on weeping about how hard a time people south of the border were having.
None of which made things on the farm any easier, only somewhat easier to bear. Things on the farm were desperately hard, and all the harder because Julia had married Kenneth Marble and gone off to live with him. She came back to visit fairly often, usually bringing Beth Marble, Kenneth’s mother, with her, and Kenneth himself stopped by every so often for a burst of work for which a man’s strength came in handy. Things weren’t the same, though, and Mary and her own mother both knew it.
“One of these days before too long, you’ll meet somebody, too,” Maude McGregor said over supper after a long, wearing day out in the fields. “You’ll meet somebody, get married yourself, and move away. I’ll probably have to sell this place and move in with you or Julia.”
“I wouldn’t do that!” Mary exclaimed.
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Her mother smiled. “Of course you would. You should. That’s the way the world works. Young folks do what they need to do, and older ones ride along with it as best they can. I don’t see how we’d go on if things worked any different.”
“It doesn’t seem right. It isn’t right,” Mary said—she’d had that passionate certainty for as long as she’d been alive. After a moment, she went on, “If I ever marry anybody”—and the thought had crossed her mind more and more often since she’d passed her twentieth birthday—“he ought to come and live here and help us work this place. Then our children could go right on working it, years and years from now.”
“The trouble with that, you know, is that Julia and Kenneth, and their children when they have them, have an interest in this land, too,” her mother said.
“Julia doesn’t seem very interested,” Mary said. “She went off without so much as a backwards glance.”
“Julia doesn’t seem very interested now,” her mother replied. “How she’ll feel about things ten or twenty years from now—or how her husband and her children will feel—well, how can anybody know for sure?”
Thinking about what things might be like ten or twenty years from now still didn’t seem natural to Mary. She tried to imagine herself at forty, but no picture formed in her mind. That lay too far in the future to mean anything to her now. She wondered if Julia still felt the same way. Maybe not—with a husband at hand, she had to be looking forward to having children.
How children were begotten was no mystery to Mary, as it could be no mystery to anyone who’d grown up on a farm. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with the process was a different question. To let a man do that with her, to her . . . She shook her head. The mere idea was repulsive. But people did it. That was what being married was about. She knew that, too. If people didn’t do it, after a while there wouldn’t be any more people.
Sometimes that didn’t seem such a bad idea.
Her mother went on, “A couple of knotholes have popped out of the wood in the barn. I want you to nail wood over them when you get the chance, so the inside will stay warmer in winter. The sooner you do it, the sooner we don’t have to worry about it any more.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Mary promised. “I’ve noticed ’em, too, especially the one that came out right behind that old wagon wheel.”
“Yes, that’s the biggest one,” Maude McGregor agreed. “A good patch there will keep a lot of warm air from leaking out when the weather turns cold again—and it will.”
“I know,” Mary said. No one who’d lived in Manitoba any time from September to April could help knowing.
When she went out to the barn the next morning, she took care of the livestock first. That had to be done, and done every day. As soon as she’d finished, she went over to her father’s work bench. She cut a square off a flat board, then grabbed the wood, a hammer, and some nails and went to get at the knot that had turned into a knothole.
It was right behind that wagon wheel. She had to put down the tools and the patch to wrestle the wheel out of the way. “Miserable thing,” she muttered, or perhaps something a little stronger than that. Why the devil hadn’t her father got rid of it? Come to that, why hadn’t she or her mother in the years since her father died? She had no good answer except that there had always been more important things to do.
Once she’d shifted the wheel, she picked up the square of wood and the hammer and nails and advanced on the knothole. As she took the next to last step, she frowned. It didn’t sound right—she’d never known that reverberation anywhere else in the barn. It didn’t feel quite right underfoot, either. Ground had no business giving slightly, as it did here. It almost felt as if . . .
Mary bent down to look more closely at where she’d been standing. It just looked like dirt, with straw scattered over it. But when she scraped at it with her hand, she didn’t have to dig far at all before her fingers found a board—undoubtedly, the board she’d trodden on after moving the broken wagon wheel.
What’s that doing there? she wondered. Almost of their own accord, her fingers kept searching till they found the edge of the board. She pulled up. Dirt slid from the board as she raised it.
Under it was a sharp-edged hollow dug into the soil. And in that hollow . . . Mary’s eyes got big and round. In that hollow rested sticks of dynamite and blasting caps and lengths of fuse and some highly specialized tools. “At last,” she whispered. She’d finally found her father’s bomb-making gear.
The first thing she imagined was going into Rosenfeld, as Arthur McGregor had done at the end of the Great War, and blowing as many Americans as she could sky-high. She didn’t worry about getting caught. If it meant more revenge on the USA, she would gladly pay the price. The real problem was, she didn’t know enough about explosives to make a bomb that had any real chance of doing what she wanted it to do.
I can learn, she thought. It can’t be too hard. I just have to be careful. I’m sure I can figure it out without killing myself while I’m doing it.
“Thank you, Pa,” Mary said. “I’m sorry you had to stop. I’m even sorrier you didn’t get General Custer. But the fight’s not done. The fight won’t be done till Canada’s free again.”
She looked toward that old, broken wagon wheel. Suddenly, a wide smile flashed across her face. Now she understood why her father had never repaired it or got rid of it. It perfectly concealed his tools and explosives. Not one of the Yankee soldiers who’d searched this barn—and there had been a lot of them, for they’d suspected much more than they could ever prove—had thought to move it and see what lay underneath. She wouldn’t have thought of it, either, if she hadn’t had to shift the wheel for an altogether different reason.
She wondered if she could find anyone in the sputtering Canadian resistance movement who could teach her about making bombs. Then, almost as soon as the thought occurred to her, she shook her head. Her father had gone his own way in fighting the Americans, which meant no one had betrayed him. No one could betray him if no one knew what he was doing.
People told a bitter joke: when three people sit down to conspire, one is a fool and the other two American spies. That would have been funnier had it not held so painfully much truth. More than once, the Rosenfeld Register had exulted about plots that failed because one member or another gave them away to the Yankees.
Mary McGregor nodded to herself. Whatever I do, I’ll do it alone. That’s how Pa did it. He’d still be blowing them up if he hadn’t had bad luck. It’s my turn now. I’ll be as careful as he was, or even more so. Nobody will give me away, and I won’t give myself away, either.
Some people said even the big Canadian uprising of a few years before had been betrayed to the Americans before it broke out, that they’d been on the alert because of that. Mary had even heard some people with reputations as patriots had turned traitor because they’d fallen in love with invaders from the south.
She didn’t want to believe that. She had trouble imagining any proper Canadian falling in love with a Yankee. The Americans had ravished the country. Wouldn’t they be ravishing anyone in it who had anything to do with them? That was how it seemed to Mary. As far as she was concerned, nobody who’d betrayed the uprising deserved to live.
“Yes, that’s what I’ll do,” she said, as if someone had suggested it to her. Getting rid of traitors was the best way she could think of to remind the whole country that going along with the occupation had a price.
She wanted to go out and start planting bombs that very morning. She knew some names. She was sure she could learn others without much trouble. But she checked herself. You were going to be careful, remember? After nodding, she patched the knothole that had led to her discovery. Then she carefully concealed the hole in the ground once more, replacing the board, covering it with dirt and straw, and putting the old wagon wheel back where it belonged. When she was done, she looked hard at the ground and did a little more smoothing. Satisfied at last, she nodded and w
ent on to cover up the other knots that had come out of the planking.
“Took you long enough,” her mother said when Mary came into the farmhouse. “I didn’t think it was that hard a job.”
“Sorry, Ma.” Mary had known from the minute she lifted the edge of the board and saw what lay beneath it that she couldn’t tell her mother about it. What would Maude McGregor do? Pitch a fit and tell her to leave the stuff alone. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. She was also sure she wouldn’t leave the stuff alone, no matter what her mother told her to do.
“Sorry?” Her mother shook her head. “Don’t you think you have enough other things to take care of? What were you doing, playing with the chicks? You haven’t done that since you were a little girl.”
“I know, but I was looking at them, and they looked so cute—and they turn into stupid, boring old hens so fast. I wanted to have some fun with them while I could. They act so silly.” Mary seized on the explanation with both hands. She didn’t like to lie to her mother, but preferred that to telling the truth here.
“Can’t afford to get sentimental about ’em,” her mother said. “They’ll go into the pot when they stop giving enough eggs to be worth their keep. Nothing like a good chicken stew on a cold winter night.”
“I know that, too, Ma.” Mary didn’t want to say anything to stir her mother up or make her start asking questions. Agreeing with everything Maude McGregor said was also liable to make her mother wonder, but not in any dangerous way.
Or so Mary thought, till her mother asked, “Are you all right, dear?”
Mary thought that over. After a couple of seconds, she nodded. “I’m swell, Ma. I’m the best I’ve been for a long time, matter of fact.” Her mother gave her a quizzical look, but not of the sort to make her worry. No, she didn’t worry at all. Everything was going to be fine now. She could feel it.
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