The visits did remind her how much time had passed by. Mary’s mother had had hair as red as her own. No more; it was almost all gray now. As Mary neared thirty-five, the first silver threads were running through her copper, too.
She and her mother sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating sweet rolls her mother had baked. “Oh, Ma,” Mary said, “the smells in here take me back to when I was a little girl. The oilcloth on the table, the coal fire, the kerosene lamps, all the cooking…” She shook her head, lost in a world that would never come back again, a world where her father and older brother were alive, a world where the Yanks hadn’t occupied Canada for a generation.
“It does smell different in your apartment,” her mother agreed. Quickly, she added, “Not bad-not bad at all-but not the same, either.”
“No, not the same,” Mary said. She had a gas stove and electricity; the one didn’t smell like coal, while the other didn’t smell like anything. And what she cooked just wasn’t the same as what her mother made. She couldn’t put her finger on the difference, but she knew it was there.
“How are the Frenchies?” Maude McGregor asked.
“They’re there.” Mary made a sour face. These days, the United States needed all the soldiers they could scrape up to fight the Confederate States. The men now occupying Rosenfeld and a lot of other Canadian towns came from the Republic of Quebec. They wore blue-gray uniforms, not U.S. green-gray. Mary couldn’t stand them. They should have been Canadians, too, but instead they helped the Yanks oppress their countrymen. Most of them-almost all of the young ones who’d grown up in the so-called Republic-spoke nothing but French, and jibber-jabbered in it all the time. As far as she was concerned, that added insult to injury.
“Any trouble with them?” her mother asked.
“No,” Mary said tonelessly. “No trouble at all.”
She wondered where her mother would go with that, but Maude McGregor didn’t go anywhere at all. She only nodded and got the teapot and filled her own cup. She held the pot out to Mary, who nodded. Her mother refilled it. The milk Mary added came from one of the cows in the barn.
“How’s Alec?” her mother asked.
Mary smiled. She didn’t have to consider her answers and watch every word about her son. “He’s fine, Ma. He’s growing like a weed, he raises trouble every chance he gets, and he’s doing good in kindergarten. Of course, he already pretty much knew how to read and write before he started.”
“I should hope so,” her mother said. “You and Julia and Alexander did, too.”
Alec was named for Mary’s dead older brother. Remembering him took the smile off her face. She said, “You know what the bad thing is about school these days?”
“Of course I do,” Maude McGregor said. “The Yanks pound their lies into the heads of children who aren’t old enough to know malarkey when they hear it.”
“That’s it. That’s just it.” Mary didn’t know what to do about it, either. Her mother and father had pulled her out of school when the Americans started throwing propaganda around instead of teaching about what had really happened-that was how Canadians saw it, anyhow. No one had raised a fuss back then, but rules were stricter now. And Mary didn’t want the Yanks paying attention to her for any reason.
Her mother said, “And Mort? How’s the diner doing?”
“Pretty well,” Mary answered. “One of the cooks burned his hand, so he’ll be out a few days. Mort’s filling in behind the stove.”
“Must be strange, having a man who knows how to cook,” her mother remarked.
“It is. It keeps me on my toes all the time,” Mary said. “But it’s all right. I’m glad I found anybody, and Mort and I get along real good.”
She’d had a young man courting her when her father was killed by his own bomb trying to blow up General Custer as he passed through Rosenfeld. Afterwards, the young man dropped her as if she were explosive herself. Nobody looked at her for years after that, not till Mort Pomeroy did. Was it any wonder she’d promptly fallen in love?
Her mother said, “I’m glad you do. It’s nice. Your father and I, we hardly had a harsh word between us.”
“I know, Ma.” Mary also knew why. Her mother noticed everything and said nothing. If she didn’t complain, how could Pa have found fault with her? Mary wasn’t like that. She’d never believed in suffering in silence. If something was wrong, she let the world know about it. She didn’t always restrict herself to words, either, any more than her father had. She asked, “How are things here?”
“Oh, I get along,” Maude McGregor answered. “I’ve been getting along for years and years now. I expect I’m good for a little while longer.”
The farm lacked not only electricity but also running water and indoor plumbing. Mary had never noticed what was missing when she was growing up. She’d taken the pungency of the outhouse as much for granted as the different pungency of the barn. Kerosene lamps had always seemed good enough. So had the pot-bellied coal-burning stove. Now the stinks and the inconveniences, though still familiar, jolted her when she visited. Little by little, she’d got used to an easier life in town.
Even so, she said, “I’m going out to the barn for some chores.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” her mother said quickly.
“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” Mary did intend to gather eggs and feed the animals while she was out there; she wasn’t dressed for mucking out the place. That wasn’t all she would do, though. Her mother knew as much, knew and worried. But, being who and what she was, she couldn’t bring herself to say much.
A motorcar rolled along the dirt track that ran in front of the McGregor farm as Mary went from the farmhouse to the barn. The dirt road didn’t see much traffic these days, though Mary remembered endless columns of soldiers in green-gray marching along it when she was a little girl: U.S. soldiers heading for the front that had stalled between Rosenfeld and Winnipeg. Then the front wasn’t stalled anymore, the Yanks got what they’d always wanted, and hard times descended on Canada. They weren’t gone yet.
The barnyard stink wasn’t as sharp and oppressive as the one from the privy. It made Mary smile instead of wrinkling her nose. Her shoes scrunched on straw as she walked back toward the chickens. She proved to herself that she still knew how to get eggs out of nests without ruffling feathers and without getting pecked. A few hens clucked complaints, but that was all. Smiling a self-satisfied smile, she put the eggs in a basket.
That done, she fed all the livestock. She could still handle a pitchfork, too. She didn’t have much need to do that in the apartment in Rosenfeld. Come to think of it, though, sometimes a pitchfork would come in handy for prodding Alec along in the right direction.
Off in one corner of the front of the barn lay an old wagon wheel. Its iron tire was red with rust. It had been lying there for at least twenty years, probably longer. Anyone who saw it would figure it was just a piece of junk nobody’d bothered getting rid of. Mary had thought the same thing for years.
Now, grunting, she shoved it off to one side and scraped away at the straw and dirt under it. Before long, her fingernails rasped against a board. She got the board free and looked down into the neat, rectangular hole in the ground it and the wagon wheel concealed.
Her father had dug out that hole to hide his bomb-making tools. The U.S. occupiers had long suspected him. They’d searched the farmhouse and the barn again and again. Despite their suspicions, they’d never found a thing. Arthur McGregor had known what he was doing, in explosives as in everything else.
These days, the bomb-making tools belonged to Mary. She hadn’t used them as often as her father had. But she’d bombed the general store in town (owned by a Yank), killed a traitor in Ontario (she thought of it that way, not as blowing up a woman and a little girl), and derailed a train not far from Coulee, the next town west of Rosenfeld. With Ohio lost, the United States depended on rail traffic through Canada. Doing the train had proved easier than she’d expected. She thoug
ht she would go in some other direction when she planted her next bomb.
She was so intent on her work, she didn’t hear the running feet till they were just outside the barn. She looked up in horror as half a dozen men in green-gray, some with pistols in their hands, others with rifles, burst in shouting, “Hold it right there! You’re under arrest, in the name of the United States of America!”
It was over. After all these years, it was over. Mary lifted one of the sticks of dynamite that had sat in her lap. “If you want to take the chance of shooting this instead of me-” she began. If the dynamite went up, the Yanks would go up with it-a good enough last exchange, as far as she was concerned.
But one of the riflemen said, “Ma’am, I’ve been on the national rifle team at ranges a lot longer than this-they didn’t know if they’d need a sharpshooter to take you. If I shoot, I won’t miss, and I won’t hit the explosives.”
He sounded coldly confident, confident enough to make Mary believe him. She set down the dynamite and slowly got to her feet. “Raise your hands!” two Americans shouted at the same time. She obeyed. Why not? Nothing mattered anymore. One of the Yanks said, “Out of the barn now. Slow and easy. Don’t do anything cute, or you won’t last long enough to stand trial.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure you’re worried about that,” Mary said. They didn’t answer her. Why should they? They’d won.
When she got outside, she saw two more Yanks holding her mother back. They’d slapped a gag on her so she couldn’t scream and warn Mary. Two motorcars were parked by the side of the house. She thought one was the auto she’d seen driving along the dirt road. They must have been keeping an eye on her all along, then.
“Leave my mother alone,” she said dully. “She never had anything to do with this. It was all me.”
“We’ll see about that,” one of the Yanks said. But he turned to the men holding Maude McGregor. “Take the gag off her, Jack. She can yell her head off now. It won’t make any difference.”
As soon as Jack removed the gag, Mary’s mother said, “She’s lying to save me. I was the one who set the bombs.”
“That isn’t so!” Mary exclaimed. “How about that one the other side of Coulee, Ma? You don’t even drive.”
“I took the wagon,” her mother said with stubborn, hopeless defiance.
“And that’s how come we caught your daughter in there with dynamite in her lap, right?” said the Yank who seemed to be in charge of things. He waved to his men. “Get her into the auto. We’ll take her up to Winnipeg and tend to business there.”
As the other Americans obeyed, one of them asked, “How about the old broad?” Both Mary and her mother squawked irately. The Yanks ignored them.
“Leave her alone for now,” their boss said. “Looks to me like we’ve got the one we want.” They shoved Mary into a Chevrolet. As it sped off down the dirt road, she knew how right he was.
Chester Martin had known rejoining the U.S. Army would make his wife furious. He hadn’t known how furious. Rita had lost her first husband in the Great War, and seemed sure she would lose her second in this one. When Chester reupped, he’d asked for a month to get his affairs in order before he went in. The Army gave it to him; they weren’t conscripting middle-aged retreads, even if they were glad to have them, and so they’d acted accommodating as all get-out.
Now he wished he hadn’t asked for so long. It was the longest month of his life. “You said they’d shot you last time, and that was plenty for you!” Rita said over and over again. “You lied!” She might have accused him of falling off the wagon-or maybe falling into the arms of an old girlfriend came closer to the mark.
And maybe he was. He had no romantic illusions about war. Nobody who’d been a noncom in the trenches all the way through the Great War could possibly have any illusions about it. But he kept saying, “The country needs me,” and that was no illusion. The United States needed all the help they could get from anywhere.
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” Rita would ask. That stung, not least because he had. His hair, once sandy-brown, was graying and thinning at the temples. There were lines on his forehead, and more beside his pointed nose. He had a double chin and something of a belly. He still had muscles, though; nobody could hold a construction job without them.
His son, Carl, who was six, didn’t know whether to be proud of him or worried about him. Carl knew people could get shot. “You won’t let that happen to you, will you, Dad?” he would ask.
“Not me,” Chester would answer gravely. “That kind of stuff always happens to the other guy.” Carl accepted that. Chester knew better, but didn’t want to burden the boy with worries he couldn’t do anything about. Rita knew better, too, and wasted no time pointing out to Chester what a liar he was.
With all that going on, then, he wasn’t altogether unhappy escaping the little rented house in East Los Angeles and heading to the recruiting station a few blocks away when the time finally came. He took the oath there, which officially put him back in uniform. They gave him just enough of a physical to make sure he had a pulse and could see out of both eyes. If he’d flunked the second half, he suspected they would have worked something out.
They gave him a uniform, too. The tunic was too tight and the trousers were baggy; the tailoring hadn’t changed a bit since the Great War. They gave him a first sergeant’s stripes on his left sleeve. He knew what that meant. “You’re going to have me nursemaid some officer who was still spitting up sour milk when the Confederates tossed in the sponge the last time.”
He got exactly no sympathy, which was exactly what he’d expected. The sergeant who’d talked him into rejoining said, “Well, Martin? What about it? Are you going to tell me you’re not qualified for the job? I’ll say bullshit to your face if you’ve got the brass to try it.”
Martin didn’t have that kind of brass. Maybe he could keep a kid from getting some good men killed. He might even save the kid’s neck-and, with luck, his own in the process.
His orders were to report to a replacement depot in Virginia. Accompanying them was a travel voucher for rail transportation from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. He asked the noncom who gave him the voucher, “How the devil do I get from Milwaukee to where I’m supposed to go? Stick out my thumb?”
“Beats me,” that worthy said cheerfully. “For all I know, hitching’s faster than any other way. Once you get to Milwaukee, I promise they’ll tell you what to do next.”
“I hope so.” Martin didn’t trust Army bureaucracy. While the people in Wisconsin were figuring out how to get him past the Confederate corridor that split the USA in two, the people in Virginia were liable to decide he was AWOL if he didn’t show up on time and throw him in the guardhouse when he finally did. He knew that was unreasonable. He also knew the Army had some strange notions about what was reasonable and what wasn’t.
He had a brand-new green-gray duffel bag slung over his shoulder when he went to Remembrance Station, the big new railroad depot in downtown Los Angeles. Rita and Carl came along to say good-bye. If Rita cried, she wasn’t the only wife with a husband in uniform who did. He squeezed her and kissed her one last time, kissed Carl on the forehead, and climbed into a second-class car. Maybe officers got Pullman berths. Sergeants, or at least one sergeant in particular, didn’t.
More than half the men in the car were soldiers, either coming back from leave or reporting to duty for the first time. Chester listened. The chatter sounded much like what he remembered from the last go-round. Nobody seemed to want to talk to him. That didn’t surprise him. He had a lot of stripes on his sleeve, and he was at least twice the age of most of the men in green-gray.
When night came, the train slowed down to a crawl. He hadn’t thought about how the blackout applied to trains. He realized he should have. If locomotives went tearing along at full speed behind the beam of a big, bright light, they shouted, Hey, come shoot me up! at whatever enemy airplanes happened to be in the neighborhood. That made perfect sens
e-once you worked it out.
Conductors went through the cars making sure blackout curtains were in place on every window. Light leaking out the sides was as bad as any other kind. Chester wondered how likely an attack was. He shrugged. If it could happen at all, you didn’t want to take needless chances.
About half an hour after the blackout curtains came down, Chester went back to the dining car. The featured entree was something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland. He looked at the private at the table next to his and said, “I’m not back on duty yet, but now I feel like I’m back in the Army, by God.”
“Yeah.” The kid was pushing the gravy-smeared meat around with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “This is pretty lousy, isn’t it?” He eyed Martin’s heavily striped sleeve. “Have you, uh, been in the Army all along?”
By the way he said it, he might have meant since the War of Secession, or possibly since the War of the Roses. Chester laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I got out in 1917”-undoubtedly before the private was born-“and went on with my life.”
“Oh.” The youngster digested that, which had to be easier than digesting the Swiss steak. He risked another question: “How come you came back? They conscripted me. I had to go. But you must’ve had it made.”
“Well, not quite,” Martin said. “I was doing all right, but I wasn’t rich or anything. But I didn’t want to see Jake Featherston kicking us in the slats, and so here I am.”
“Uh-huh.” The private seemed surprised anybody who didn’t have to would put on the uniform. Maybe he was what was wrong with the USA, part of the reason the country was having so much trouble with the CSA. On the other hand, maybe he just had a good deal of common sense.
Chester wondered how the Chicago-bound train would go to avoid both the Mormon uprising and the chance of bumping into Confederate raiders. It headed east through Kingman and Flagstaff, New Mexico, and on to Santa Fe, where it turned north for a run through the mountains to Denver. It got hung up there for two days, though, at a little Colorado town called Salida. Somebody said Salida meant exit in Spanish, but there was no exit from the place till damaged track up ahead was repaired. Avalanche? Sabotage? No one seemed to want to say, which left Chester suspecting the worst.
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