Chapter VI
For perhaps the first time in his professional life, Colonel Irving Morrell wished he were back in Philadelphia. Fighting arguments about barrels by way of letters and telegrams from Leavenworth, Kansas, was not getting the job done in the way he would have hoped. Letters and wires were all too easy to ignore.
“What can we do, Colonel?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked when the latest unsatisfactory reply came back from the War Department. “We should have a design ready to build now, and we’re not even close.”
“Damned if I know, Lije,” Morrell answered. He tapped the papers with the tip of his index finger. “I think we would have a design by now, if the budget were what people thought it was going to be when they set up the Barrel Works.”
“Miserable Socialists,” Jenkins said angrily. “They’re trying to take away everything we won on the battlefield.”
“They’re not making anything easy for us, that’s for sure,” Morrell said. “I want to make hay while the sun shines, if you know what I mean. You have to figure the Rebs won’t stay down forever. The farther ahead of them we are when they do start getting back on their feet, the better I’ll like it.”
“Yes, sir,” Jenkins said. “We’d be a lot better off, sir, if they’d listen to you more. If they don’t want to listen to you, why did they send you out here in the first place?”
“To get me out of their hair, for one thing,” Morrell answered. “To drive me out of my mind, for another. These days, they’re so worried about spending money that they’re trying to build barrels on the cheap. I don’t know how many times I’ve explained and explained and explained that the engines in our machines aren’t strong enough to do the job, but what sort of answer do I get? What it boils down to is, ‘They did the job in the last war, so of course they’ll do the job in the next one, too.’” He looked disgusted.
So did Lije Jenkins. “With that kind of thinking, we’d have gone into the Great War with single-shot black-powder Springfields.”
Morrell nodded. “You understand that, and I understand that. The War Department understands it can get White truck engines—even the ones built in mirror image to pair with the regular model—in carload lots, cheap as it wants. Coming up with something better won’t be anywhere near as cheap. And cheap counts. Right now, cheap counts a lot.”
“Are they going to leave our country’s safety hanging on nickels and dimes?” Lieutenant Jenkins demanded indignantly. He was still very young, young enough to believe in the tooth fairy, the common sense of Congress, and a great many other unlikelihoods.
“Probably,” Morrell said, at which the lieutenant looked as if he’d just watched his puppy run over in the street. Trying not to smile, Morrell went on, “They spent twenty years after the War of Secession tossing the Army nickels and dimes and not much more, remember. They paid for it, too, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do it again.”
“They’d have to be crazy,” Jenkins exclaimed.
“No, just shortsighted,” Morrell said, shaking his head. “I think it was President Mahan who noted that the biggest trouble republics have is that, over time, the voters are apt to get tired of paying for what their country needs to defend itself. They’d sooner spend the money on bread and circuses, or else not spend it and keep it in their own pockets.”
“After everything we’ve gone through, sir, that would be a crime,” Jenkins said.
“You think so, and I think so, and the War Department thinks so, too,” Morrell replied, this time with a shrug. “The voters don’t think so. They’ve sent a lot of Socialists to Congress this year. We do what we can with what we have, that’s all. If we haven’t got much, we do what we can with that. Pharaoh made the Israelites make bricks without straw.”
“A crime,” Lieutenant Jenkins repeated. He wasn’t old enough to recall the cheeseparing the Army had had to put up with during the dark years after the War of Secession. Neither was Morrell, but he’d listened to older soldiers grouse about it ever since he’d put on a green-gray uniform. General Custer, under whom he’d served in Tennessee, had been through it all.
And now, he’d heard, Custer was up in Canada, in charge of the soldiers bringing U.S. authority to a land larger than the United States. He didn’t know how the old warhorse would shape in that assignment. It didn’t seem to call for the slam-bang drive that characterized Custer’s fighting style. On the other hand, Morrell would have preferred it to sitting behind a desk in Philadelphia. No doubt Custer did, too.
Morrell dismissed his former commander from his mind. He glanced over at Lije Jenkins, who still looked unhappy with the world. “The only thing we can do is our best,” Morrell said. A cuckoo came out of the clock on the wall and announced six o’clock. Morrell grinned. “The other thing we can do now is head over to the mess hall and get supper. And after that, didn’t I hear something about a dance in town tonight?”
“Yes, sir.” Jenkins’ eyes sparkled. “I’m going over there. You feel like cutting a rug, too, sir?” He eyed Morrell with a certain bemused curiosity.
Morrell had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. “I’m not a great-grandfather ready for the boneyard yet, Lieutenant,” he said. “There’s still some juice left in here.” He set a hand over his chest and grinned wickedly. “After supper, shall we race over to the dance hall?”
“Uh, no, sir,” Jenkins said. “You ran me into the mud out on the practice range. I figure you can probably do the same thing on sidewalks.” His grin had a wicked touch, too. “But, sir, there’ll be girls there, you know.”
“I should hope so,” Morrell said. “You don’t think I’d want to waltz or foxtrot with an ugly customer like you, do you?” As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Jenkins was a handsome young man. That still didn’t mean Morrell wanted to dance with him.
Morrell was heading toward thirty now, and had never come close to acquiring a wife. His eye had always been on the war ahead, as the eyes of the United States had been. But now the war was over and won, and single-minded devotion to duty was looking harder and less desirable not only to the country but also to Irving Morrell.
He did not head for the dance with Lieutenant Jenkins seriously expecting to find a wife the minute he stepped out onto the floor. That would have been unreasonable in the extreme, and he knew it. But if he did find a young lady, a lady he found attractive, he was ready and more than ready to pursue the matter and see where it led. He nodded as he left Fort Leavenworth. He’d never had that kind of determination before, not about anything except the battlefield.
Leavenworth, Kansas, was a town of about twenty thousand people. Not all of them served the fort, by any means. Many mined the large coal deposits in the area, while others worked in flour and lumber mills. But, regardless of whether the locals worked for the Army or not, soldiers got solid respect in Leavenworth. It had been an antislavery settlement back in the days before the War of Secession, when the South tried to make Kansas a slave state. Only the oldest of the old-timers recalled those days now, but the tradition of hatred for the Confederacy ran strong here, as it did in much of Kansas.
Morrell and Jenkins strode past a large bronze statue of John Brown the citizens of Leavenworth had erected after the Second Mexican War. Brown was and always had been a hero to many Kansans. He’d become a national hero during the 1880s, when people in the United States began to see that he’d known what he was doing when he’d attacked the Southerners not only here but also in their own lair down in Virginia.
The dance was at a social hall next to a white-painted Baptist church with a tall steeple, a spare building that might have been transported bodily from New England to the prairie. Sounds of piano and fiddle music drifted out into the night. “That’s not the best playing I’ve ever heard,” Morrell said, which was, if anything, a generous assessment, “but they do go right after a tune.”
“Yes, sir,” Jenkins answered. “Now we just have to hope it’s not one of the dances where they’ve got maybe half a dozen girls and five hundred guys waiting to dance with them. A little bit of that kind goes a long way.”
It was chilly outside; a coal stove and the dancers’ exertions heated the social hall, so that a blast of warm air greeted Morrell when he opened the door. After looking around, he nodded approval: men did not hopelessly outnumber women. Not all the men were soldiers—close to half wore civilian clothes. Morrell had never feared competition of any sort.
A punch bowl sat on a table at the far end of the hall. He went over to it, got himself a glass, and leaned against the wall, watching couples spin and dip more or less in time to the music. Scouting the terrain before advancing was a good idea in other things besides warfare.
Lije Jenkins, on the other hand, plunged straight into the fray, cutting in on a civilian in a sharp suit. The fellow gave him a sour look as he retired toward the sidelines. Leavenworth might have liked soldiers pretty well, but cutting in like that was liable to start a brawl anywhere.
With a final raucous flourish, the little three-piece band stopped its racket. People clapped their hands, not so much to applaud the musicians as to show they were having a good time. Men and women headed over to the punch bowl. Morrell quickly drained his own glass and, with the empty glass as an excuse, contrived to get to the bowl at the same time as a woman in a ruffled shirtwaist and maroon wool skirt.
He filled the ladle, then, after catching her eye to make sure the liberty would not be unwelcome, poured punch into her glass before dealing with his own. “Thank you,” she said. She was within a couple of years of thirty herself, with hair black as coal, brown eyes, and warm brown skin with a hint of blush beneath it. When she took a longer look at Morrell, one eyebrow rose. “Thank you very much, Colonel.”
He was, he suddenly realized, a catch: glancing around, he saw a couple of captains, but no soldiers of higher rank. Men were not the only ones playing this game. Well, on with it: “My pleasure,” he said. “If you like, you can pay me back by giving me the next dance.”
“I’ll do that,” she said at once. “My name is Hill, Agnes Hill.”
“Very pleased to meet you.” Morrell gave his own name. The musicians struck up what was no doubt intended to be a waltz. He guided her out onto the dance floor. He danced with academic precision. His partner didn’t, but it mattered little; the floor was so crowded, couples kept bumping into one another. Everyone laughed when it happened: it was expected.
They talked under and through the semimusical racket. “My husband was killed in the first few weeks of the war,” Agnes Hill said. “He was up on the Niagara front, and the Canadians had lots of machine guns, and—” She shrugged in Morrell’s arms.
“I’m sorry,” he answered. She shrugged again. Morrell said, “I got shot myself about that time, in Sonora. Only reason I’m here is luck.”
His dancing partner nodded. “I’ve thought about luck a lot the past few years, Colonel. That’s all you can do, isn’t it?—think, I mean.” She whirled on with him for another few steps, then said, “I’m glad you were lucky. I’m glad you are here.” As the music ended, Morrell was glad he was there, too.
Lucien Galtier did not converse with his horse while driving up to Rivière-du-Loup, as he usually did. The horse, a heartless beast, seemed to feel no lack. And Galtier had conversation aplenty, for, instead of going up to the town by the St. Lawrence alone, he had along Marie, his two sons, and the three daughters still living at home with them.
“I can’t wait to see the baby,” Denise said. She’d been saying that since word came from Leonard O’Doull that Nicole had had a baby boy the evening before.
“I want to see Nicole,” Marie said. “Not for nothing do they call childbirth labor.” She glared at Lucien, as if to say it was his fault Nicole had endured what she’d endured. Or maybe she was just thinking it was the fault of men that women endured what they endured.
Soothingly, Galtier said, “All is well with Nicole, and all is well with the baby, too, for which I give thanks to the holy Mother of God.” He crossed himself. “And I also give thanks that Nicole gave birth with a doctor attending her who was so intimately concerned with her well-being.”
“Intimately!” Marie sniffed and slapped him on the leg. Then she sniffed again, on a slightly different note. “A midwife was plenty good for me.”
“A midwife is good,” Lucien agreed, not wanting to quarrel with his wife. But he did not abandon his own opinion, either. “A doctor, I believe, is better.”
Marie didn’t argue with him, for which he was duly grateful. She kept looking around, as if she didn’t want to miss anything her sharp eyes might pick up. She didn’t get off the farm so often as he did, and wanted to make the most of the excursion in every way. After a bit, she said, “Traveling on a paved road all the way to town is very nice. It is so smooth, the wagon hardly seems to be moving.”
“Traveling on a paved road all the way to town is even better when it rains,” Galtier said. The road had not been paved for his benefit. Paving had been extended as far out from Rivière-du-Loup as his farm only because the Americans then occupying Quebec south of the St. Lawrence had built their hospital on land they’d taken from his patrimony, not least because he hadn’t cared to collaborate with them.
And now his daughter had collaborated on a half-American child. He shook his head. He had not expected that. He had not expected it, but he welcomed it now that it was here.
Clouds drifted across the sky, hiding the sun more often than they let it show through. Snow still lay on the ground to either side of the road. More might fall at any time in the next month. The calendar said it was April, and therefore spring, but the calendar did not understand how far winter could stretch in this part of the world. Lucien and his wife and children were as well muffled as they would have been going out in January, and needed to be.
Here and there, bomb craters showed up as dimples under the snow. British and Canadian aeroplanes had done what they could to harm the Americans after their soldiers were driven north across the river. But now the wounds in the land were healing. The antiaircraft guns that had stood outside of Rivière-du-Loup—guns manned at the end of the war by soldiers in the blue-gray of the new Republic of Quebec—were gone now, stored away heaven only knew where. Lucien hoped they would never come out of storage.
Rivière-du-Loup itself perched on a spur of rock jutting out into the St. Lawrence. Inside its bounds, a waterfall plunged ninety feet from the small river that gave the town its name into the greater one. In the late seventeenth century, when Rivière-du-Loup was founded, it would have been a formidable defensive position. In these days of aeroplanes and giant cannons, Galtier wondered if there were any such thing as a formidable defensive position.
His daughter and son-in-law lived only a couple of blocks from Bishop Pascal’s church, not far from the market square. Galtier reckoned that a mixed blessing; the bishop—who had been simply Father Pascal when the war began—had jumped into bed with the Americans so quickly, he had surely endangered his vows of celibacy. There were still times when Lucien had mixed feelings about the way the war had gone. He suspected he would have those times as long as he lived.
The houses on either side pressed close to that of Dr. Leonard O’Doull. “How cramped things are here in the city,” Marie said, and clucked in distress. Lucien was inclined to agree with her. Coming into town on market day was all very well, but he would not have cared to live here.
As he was tying the horse to an apple tree in front of the house, Dr. O’Doull opened the door and waved. “Come in, all of you,” he called in his ever more Quebecois French. “Nicole can’t wait to see you, and of course you will want to see little Lucien.”
Galtier froze in his tracks. Slowly, he said, “When you sent word, you said nothing of naming the baby after me.”
“When I sent word, we had not yet decided what we would name the baby,” his son-in-law returned. “But Lucien O’Doull he shall be.” He reached into his pocket and held out cigars. “Come on. Smoke with me. It’s the custom in the United States when a man has a son.”
If the cigars were anything like the ones O’Doull usually had, Galtier would have been glad to smoke one regardless of whether he had a grandson or not. Shaken out of his startled paralysis, he hurried toward the house.
A coal fire in the fireplace held the chill at bay. Nicole sat in a rocking chair in front of the fire. She was nursing the baby, and did not get up when her family came in. She looked as if she’d been through a long spell of trench warfare: pale and battered and worn. Had Galtier not seen Marie look the same way after her children were born, he would have been alarmed. His other children, who did not remember such things so well, were alarmed. Even Georges had no snide comments ready.
Marie spoke in tones of command: “When he is finished there, hand him to me.”
“Yes, Mother. It shouldn’t be long.” Nicole sounded battered and worn, too.
Lucien Galtier stared at Lucien O’Doull as he nursed. The baby looked very red and wrinkled, its head somewhat misshapen from its passage out into the world. His children exclaimed about that, too. He said, “Every one of you looked the same way when you were born.”
Georges said, “Surely I was much more handsome.”
“What a pity it hasn’t lasted, then,” Denise said. She and her sisters laughed. So did Charles. Georges looked something less than amused.
Presently, Nicole lifted the baby from her breast to her shoulder. She patted him on the back. Lucien would have patted harder, but he’d had more practice than his daughter; he realized babies didn’t break. After a while, his grandson gave forth with a belch a grown man would not have been ashamed to own.
“Good,” Marie said. “Very good. Now he is settled. Now you will give him to me.” Nicole held the baby out with great care. Marie took him with an automatic competence she would never lose, supporting his head in her right hand as she shifted him into the crook of her left arm. “He is so small,” she murmured, as little Lucien flailed his arms at random. “When you have not had one in the house for a while, you forget how small a newborn baby is.”
“He’s a good-sized fellow,” Leonard O’Doull said. “Almost eight pounds.”
“He felt like an elephant when I was having him,” Nicole added.
Marie ignored them both. “So small,” she crooned. “So small.”
“Here, give him to me,” Lucien said. His wife gave him a dirty look, but passed him the baby after another minute or so. He discovered he still knew how to hold an infant, too. His tiny namesake stared up at him from deep blue eyes. He knew they would get darker over time, but how much darker might prove an interesting question: Leonard O’Doull had green eyes. Galtier murmured, “What are you thinking, little one?”
“What can he be thinking but, Who is this strange man?” Georges said.
“He could be thinking, Why is this man about to clout his son in the side of the head?” Galtier returned. He and Georges were both laughing. Had Lucien tried clouting his son in the side of the head, he suspected Georges could and would have made him regret it.
O’Doull said, “He probably is thinking, Who is this strange man?” Before Galtier could do more than raise an eyebrow, his son-in-law went on, “He is also thinking, What is this strange world? Everything must seem very peculiar to a baby: lights and sounds and smells and touch and all the rest. He never knew any of that before, not where he was.”
Galtier found it indelicate to mention where the baby had been before he was born. By their expressions, so did both his sons. He reminded himself O’Doull was a doctor, and thought differently of such things.
“Let me hold the baby now, Father,” Denise said. As Lucien handed his grandson to her, someone knocked on the front door.
“Who’s that?” O’Doull said in some annoyance. Then he laughed at himself. “Only one way to find out, n’est-ce pas?” He opened the door.
There stood Bishop Pascal, plump and pink and looking as impressive as a plump, pink man could in miter and cope and cassock. He almost always had a broad smile on his face, and today was no exception. “Did I hear correctly that this house had a blessed event last night?” he asked, and then, seeing little Lucien in Denise’s arms, he pointed. “Oh, very good. Very good indeed. I see that I did hear correctly.” His eyes twinkled. “I am glad to know that my sources of information remain good.”
What he meant was, I am glad my spies are on the job. Lucien understood that perfectly well. If O’Doull didn’t, it wasn’t because Galtier hadn’t told him. But Bishop Pascal was not an overt foe to Galtier these days, and had never been a foe to any American: on the contrary. Dr. O’Doull said, “Come in, your Grace, come in. Yes, Nicole had a little boy last night.” He handed the bishop a cigar.
“How wonderful!” Bishop Pascal exclaimed. He held out his arms. Denise glanced at Galtier, who nodded ever so slightly. She passed the bishop the baby. He proved to know how to hold him. Beaming, he asked, “And how is he called?”
“Lucien,” Leonard O’Doull answered.
“Ah, excellent!” No, Bishop Pascal never stopped smiling. He aimed that large mouthful of teeth at Galtier. “Your name goes on.” Lucien nodded. Bishop Pascal turned back to O’Doull. “You should make sure that, as this little fellow grows up, he learns your language as well as the tongue of the Republic of Quebec.”
He surely meant it as good advice. It probably was good advice. It made Galtier bristle all the same. Leonard O’Doull answered in a mild voice: “These days, and I expect the rest of my days, the language of the Republic of Quebec is my language.”
“I meant no offense,” Bishop Pascal said quickly. “With the world as it is today, though, knowing English will help a young man throughout his life.”
That had been true before the war. It was, as the bishop had said, likely to be even more true now, with Quebec so closely involved with the USA. That didn’t mean Lucien had to like it worth a damn, though, and he didn’t.
Sylvia Enos lit a cigarette. She sucked smoke down into her lungs, held it there, and blew it out again. Then she took another drag. She didn’t feel nearly the exhilaration she had when she’d started the habit, but she did enjoy it. When she couldn’t smoke, as on the line at the galoshes factory, she got tense, even jittery. Like so many of the other women working there, she’d taken to sneaking smokes in the restroom. The place always smelled like a saloon.
Then she had to return to the line. Into the can of paint went her brush. She painted a red ring around the top of one of the black rubber overshoes sitting there in front of her, then around the other, working fast so the endless belts of the factory line would not carry them away before she could finish.
Another pair of galoshes, still warm from the mold, appeared before her. She put rings on them, too. Down the line they went. The next girl, armed with knives and shears, trimmed excess rubber from the galoshes. She threw the scraps into a bin under her foot. When the bin filled, the scraps would go back into the hopper along with fresh rubber, to be made into new overshoes. The factory wasted nothing and did everything as cheaply as possible. That was why Sylvia still had a job. Had a man taken it, they would have had to lay out a little more money every week.
After a while, the stink of rubber started to give her a headache. That happened every morning by ten o’clock. It also gave her another reason to wish for a cigarette, or maybe a whole pack. What she’d discovered the first day she lit up got truer the more she smoked: tobacco did blunt her sense of smell.
Frank Best headed her way. She groaned silently; the foreman was carrying an overshoe where she’d missed part of the red line around the top. She knew what he’d say before he said it. That didn’t stop him: “Thought you were going to slip this one by, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Best,” Sylvia said. She didn’t want him to have any kind of hold on her. “Here, give it to me. I’ll fix it.”
He held on to it. “You know, Sylvia, it really is too bad I have to take one out of a pair like this. It holds up the line and delays everybody. I hope I won’t have to do it very often from now on.”
He was holding up the line, too, by lecturing her. She didn’t say so; she knew a lost cause when she saw one. “I’ll do my best not to let it happen again,” she said. “Please let me fix it.”
At last, Best did. As if she were Leonardo working on the Mona Lisa, Sylvia completed the red ring. She handed the rubber overshoe back to Best. Please, she thought. Take it back to wherever you spotted it and leave me alone. Lectures were one thing, and bad enough. The rest of his routine was worse.
That didn’t keep him from trotting it out. “You really should pay more attention to what you’re doing,” he said. “I would be disappointed, and I know you would be, too, if you made mistakes like this very often. Work is sometimes hard to find these days.”
“Mr. Best, I don’t make mistakes like this very often,” Sylvia answered. “You’ve said so yourself.”
He went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “If the people above you are happy with you, though, things are liable to go a lot better for you.”
She knew how he wanted to be above her: on a bed in some cheap hotel room. She found the idea more appalling than appealing. Now that George was gone, she did have times when she missed a man, sometimes very much. Frank Best, though, was emphatically not the man she missed.
Not understanding him seemed the safest course here. “I’ll be extra careful from now on, Mr. Best. I promise I will.”
He gave her a sour look. She wondered if he would make himself plainer. If he said, Sleep with me or lose your job, what would she do? She’d get up and quit, that was what. Maybe her expression said as much, for he turned and walked away, muttering under his breath.
Sylvia got back to work. She took extra care with the rings all morning long. If Best wanted an excuse to bother her, he’d have to invent one; she didn’t want to give him any. She felt his eye on her more than once, but pretended not to notice. At last, the lunch whistle blew.
“Was Frank singing his little be-nice-or-else song at you?” Sarah Wyckoff asked, gnawing on a chicken leg probably left over from supper the night before.
“He sure was.” Sylvia took a fierce bite of her own sandwich, which was made from day-old bread and sausage that tasted as if it were about half sawdust. For all Sylvia knew, it was. It cost half as much as a better brand. That mattered.
“He has no shame,” May Cavendish said. “None.”
“He’s a foreman,” Sarah said. “Of course he has no shame.”
“A foreman at the canning plant where I used to work got one of the girls there in a family way,” Sylvia said. Her friends made sad clucking noises and nodded knowingly. “I never found out if he married her afterwards or not—I got fired because I had to take care of my kids when they caught the chicken pox.”
She thought Isabella Antonelli would have come and let her know if everything had turned out all right. She hadn’t seen the other woman from the canning plant in a long time. That might have meant Isabella was deliriously happy and didn’t need her any more. It was more likely to mean the foreman from the canning plant had left her in the lurch. Sylvia wondered if she’d ever find out what had happened. Life didn’t tie up every loose end with a neat bow, the way novels did.
“That’s just like a man.” Sarah Wyckoff studied her own brawny forearm. “Nobody’s going to trifle with me, not and keep his teeth he won’t.”
May sighed. “Men make it so you don’t want to live with them, and they make it so you can’t hardly make a living by yourself. You don’t make as much as a man would doing the same job, and they don’t let you do half the jobs anyhow. You tell me what’s fair about that.”
“If they didn’t pay us less than they would a man, we wouldn’t have these jobs we’ve got here,” Sylvia said. The other two women nodded.
“And they won’t let us vote here in Massachusetts, either,” May said bitterly. “They’ve got to pass a law that says we can, and who’s got to pass it? Men, that’s who. You think more than half the men over at the New State House are going to vote for women? Hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not going to hold my breath, either.”
“There are a lot of states where it did happen.” Sylvia’s voice was wistful. “The world didn’t end, either.”
“You’d figure it did, the way some men carry on,” Sarah said. “May’s right. They aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.”
May ate an apple down to a very skinny core, then took out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then blew an elegant smoke ring. “I like a smoke after I eat,” she said. “Sort of settles what’s in there, if you know what I mean.”
“I sure do.” Sylvia got out her own cigarettes. The front of the pack showed soldiers in green-gray marching to victory. Nobody ever showed the mangled corpses of soldiers in green-gray and sailors in Navy blue who didn’t live to see victory. Sylvia never would have thought that way if she hadn’t lost George. Now, deliberately, she turned the pack over so she wouldn’t have to see those pink-cheeked soldiers. “Thanks for giving me a cigarette that time, May. I like ’em now.”
“Good.” May Cavendish had been about to put her cigarettes back into her handbag. She stopped and aimed the pack at Sarah. “Want to try ’em?”
“No, thanks.” Sarah shook her head. “I’ve smoked a couple of times. Never liked it enough to keep up with it. Don’t expect I would now, either.”
“Have it your own way,” May said with a shrug. She did put away the pack.
Sylvia smoked her cigarette with determination. She coughed only once. Her chest was getting used to tobacco smoke, too. And May was right: even without the buzz she’d got when first starting the habit, a smoke after dinner or supper was more enjoyable than just about any other time.
George had liked to smoke after they made love. Sylvia’s ears heated as she remembered that. She wondered what taking a deep drag while lazy in the afterglow would be like. Probably pretty nice, she thought. Would she ever have the chance to find out?
“There have to be some decent men out there somewhere,” she said suddenly.
“A lot of them are dead,” Sarah said. “My Martin is.” She sighed and looked down at the grimy wood of the floor. “I still can’t think about him without wanting to puddle up. I don’t even know if I’d ever want to be with anybody else.”
“I would, if I could find somebody,” May said. “But a lot of the men who are decent are settled down with their wives, on account of that’s what decent men do, and a lot of men, whether they’re decent or not, don’t want anything to do with you if you’ve got children.”
“Oh, there’s one thing they want to do with you,” Sylvia said. Both her friends laughed at the obvious truth in that. Sylvia went on, “But those aren’t the decent ones. Maybe I ought to go to church more often, but Sunday’s the only chance I have to rest even a little, not that I can get much with two kids in the house.”
“Plenty of men who go to church every livelong Sunday aren’t what you’d call decent, either,” May said, sounding as if she was speaking with the voice of experience. “They don’t go there to pray or to listen to the sermon—they go on account of they’re on the prowl.”
“That’s disgraceful,” Sylvia said.
“Sweetheart, there’s a whole lot of disgraceful things that go on in this world,” Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. “You don’t have to look no further than Frank Best if you want to see some.”
“Well, heaven knows that’s true,” Sylvia said with a sigh. “Now that I’ve told him no, I only hope he leaves me alone and doesn’t take it out on me like he said he was liable to.”
“All depends,” said May, who’d been at the galoshes factory longer than Sylvia. “If he finds somebody who goes along with him before too long, he’ll forget about you. If he doesn’t, you may not have such a good time for a while.”
Sylvia wondered how she ought to feel about hoping some other young woman succumbed to what Best thought of as his fatal charm. It would make her own life easier, no doubt about that. But would she wish the foreman on anyone else? She couldn’t imagine disliking anyone enough to hope she suffered such a fate.
When the whistle announcing the end of the lunch hour blew, she headed without enthusiasm back to her position just behind the galoshes molds. She reminded herself to do the best job she could painting rings on the rubber overshoes, to give Frank Best no reason to bother her.
But would he need an excuse? Here he came. That wasn’t blood in his eye. Sylvia recognized the expression. George had often worn it when he’d been away at sea for a long time. Frank Best hadn’t been, though she would cheerfully have dropped him off a pier. He wore the expression anyhow. Sylvia sighed. The end of the day seemed years away.
Sometimes, Roger Kimball still wished he’d gone to South America. Every so often, the Charleston papers gave tantalizing bits of news about the fighting that continued down there even though the Great War was over everywhere else. The local enmities had started long before the war, and weren’t about to disappear because it did. Everybody but Paraguay and Bolivia needed submarine skippers, and they would have if only they’d had coastlines.
But he’d stayed in Charleston almost two years now, and he’d probably stay a while longer. For one thing, he saw Anne Colleton every so often: not so often as he would have liked, not quite so seldom as to make him give up in dismay. He understood how carefully she rationed their liaisons. It would have infuriated him more if he hadn’t admired her, too.
And, for another, he’d found, or thought he’d found, a way to help put the Confederate States back on their feet. Clarence Potter, who’d become a friend instead of a barroom acquaintance, thought he was crazy. “I can’t believe you’ve gotten yourself sucked into the Freedom Party,” Potter said one evening in Kimball’s small furnished apartment. “Those people couldn’t start a fire if you spotted them a lit torch and kindling.”
“I’m one of those people, Clarence,” Kimball said, with only a slight edge to his voice, “and I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”
“No, you’re not,” Potter said. “Your deplorable taste in politics aside, you’re an intelligent man. Believe me, that makes you stand out from the common herd in the Freedom Party. It makes you stand out from Jake Featherston, too.” He held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong—Featherston’s not stupid. But he has no more education than you’d expect, and the only thing he’s good at is getting up on the stump and making everyone else as angry as he is.”
Jack Delamotte took a pull at his whiskey. “I’ve heard him talk myself now. He even makes me angry, and I’m usually too damn lazy to get mad about anything.”
“We need to get angry, dammit,” Kimball said. “Too much wrong with this country not to get angry about it. The money’s still not worth anything, the damnyankees won’t let us have a proper Army and Navy, and half the niggers in the country act like they own it. You can’t tell me different. You know damn well it’s true.”
“Featherston has about as good a chance of solving those problems as the man in the moon,” Potter said. “Maybe less.”
“Clarence is right,” Jack Delamotte said. “He’s like one of those nigger preachers. He gets folks all hot and bothered, sure as hell, but you look at what he says and you see he doesn’t really say anything at all.”
“That’s all right,” Kimball said placidly. Potter and Delamotte both looked startled. Kimball pointed at the former intelligence officer. “Clarence, the first time we met, you were talking about finding a goal for the CSA and getting people to stick to it. You remember that?”
“Of course I do,” Potter said. “It was true then, and it’s still true now. It’s truer than ever now, because we’ve drifted longer without a rudder.”
Kimball chuckled. “Trying to talk like a Navy man, are you? Well, all right, go ahead. But you know this Featherston character, right?” He waited for Potter to nod, then went on, “Like Jack said, he’s awful damn good at riling people up. If he doesn’t have any kind of education, so what? So much the better, matter of fact. What do you say we get hold of him and give him the kind of ideas the Confederate States need to get back on their feet?”
“You and me and Clarence, saving the country?” Delamotte didn’t just seem dubious; he seemed on the point of laughing out loud.
“Somebody’s got to,” Roger Kimball answered. He wasn’t laughing, not now. “Nobody in Richmond knows how, that’s for damn sure. What do you say, Clarence? Will Featherston listen to you?”
Potter rubbed his chin. His gray eyes held uncertainty, something Kimball had rarely seen in them. At last, he said, “I don’t know for certain. He hated officers in general, but he didn’t hate me in particular, because I did him some good turns. But does that mean we’d be able to steer him the way we want him to go? I’m not sure. I’m not sure he’s in the habit of listening to anybody, either. He’s as stubborn as they come.”
Jack Delamotte looked down into his glass, which was empty. “Easy enough to get on a tiger’s back,” he observed. “How do you get off again?”
“Oh, we’d manage that,” Potter said confidently. “Any of the three of us—even you, Jack, no matter how lackadaisical you let yourself get—is a match for Featherston and then some.”
“That’s settled, then,” Kimball said, though it wasn’t, not anywhere close. “We’ll get hold of Featherston, fill him full of what we figure he ought to say, and get people to pay attention to what really needs doing.” He picked up the whiskey bottle from the table, yanked out the cork, and poured fresh drinks for himself and his friends. They solemnly clinked glasses.
As was his way, Kimball wasted no time trying to make what he planned come true. He’d become a familiar fixture at the Freedom Party offices over on King Street, next to the headquarters of the Washington Light Infantry, a unit that, as its name suggested, had fought in the wars of the CSA and the USA since the Revolution. “No, Commander,” a fellow there said from behind a typewriter, “I don’t know when Sergeant Featherston will be coming into South Carolina again. It shouldn’t be too long, though. With Congressional elections this fall, he’ll be doing a deal of traveling, I reckon. We aim to send Richmond a message from all across the country.”
“That’s fine,” Kimball said. “That’s mighty fine. Thing is, I’d like to send a message to Sergeant Featherston.” Having failed to become an officer, the leader of the Freedom Party took an upside-down pride in his noncommissioned rank. Kimball kept his face carefully straight while referring to it. “I just found out a friend of mine served in the Army of Northern Virginia and got to know him pretty well up there. He’d like to have the chance to say hello.”
“A lot of people served in the Army of Northern Virginia,” the Freedom Party man said. “I did myself, as a matter of fact. And you’d be surprised how many of them say now that they knew Sergeant Featherston then.”
“My friend’s name is Potter, Clarence Potter,” Kimball said patiently. “He told me the name I should mention is Pompey, that Sergeant Featherston would know what it meant.” Quite casually, he set a gold dollar, a tiny little coin, on the desk by the typewriter.
The Freedom Party man licked his lips. A gold dollar could buy a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of banknotes these days. He made the coin disappear: not hard when it was so small. “I reckon I can arrange a wire up to Richmond. You’re right—I know he’d be glad to hear from an old friend, and especially through Party channels.”
Kimball could have sent the telegram himself. But how many telegrams did Jake Featherston get every day? Piles, without a doubt. He’d made himself widely known through the CSA. How many of those telegrams got tossed unread? He’d pay more attention to the ones that came from inside his own outfit.
“Thanks, friend,” Kimball said, and headed off to a poker game well pleased with himself. He won, too, which left him even more pleased.
When he strolled back into the Freedom Party headquarters a couple of days later, the fellow who’d pocketed the gold dollar held out a pale yellow telegram. Kimball took it with a confidence that evaporated as he read the message: MAJOR POTTER—IF YOU CARED ABOUT SEEING ME, YOU COULD HAVE DONE IT A LONG TIME AGO. FEATHERSTON, SGT., 1ST RICHMOND HOWITZERS.
“He knows your friend, I reckon,” the Freedom Party man said, “but it doesn’t sound like he’s real hot to pay him a visit.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Kimball agreed morosely. “Thanks for trying, anyhow.” Now that he knew the man took bribes, he might want to pay him off again, which meant not growling at him now.
But what he really wanted to do was get hold of Jake Featherston. If Potter’s name wasn’t the key that fit the lock, he needed one that would. As he left the Freedom Party office, he snapped his fingers. Maybe he knew where to find it.
Since he had no telephone in his flat, he went over to the telephone exchange building and placed a call up to St. Matthews. It took a little while to go through. By now, Anne Colleton’s brother was used to Kimball calling, even if he didn’t quite accept him. But Anne answered the telephone herself. “Hello, Roger!” she said when she found out who was on the other end of the line. “What can I do for you today?”
Kimball had learned to read her tone of voice. It said, If you’re calling because you want to sleep with me, forget about it. Under other circumstances, that would have angered him. It still did, a little, but he buried that. “What do you think of the Freedom Party?” he asked.
He took her by surprise. There were several seconds of silence up in St. Matthews before she answered, “I haven’t really thought much about it one way or the other. It certainly has been making a lot of noise lately, though, hasn’t it?” Now she might have been a detective whipping out a magnifying glass. “Why do you want to know?”
He explained what he had in mind for the Freedom Party, finishing, “People are starting to listen to this Featherston. If he says the right things, he might be the one who can haul the country out of the swamp.”
“Well,” Anne said after another thoughtful pause, “I don’t know what I expected you to say when you called, but that wasn’t it.” She hesitated again. “Why do you think Featherston would listen to me?”
Kimball hadn’t wanted Featherston listening to her; he’d wanted the Freedom Party leader listening to what he had to say. Maybe Anne would say the same things he would have, but he had no guarantee about that. Still, she was waiting for an answer, and he gave her a blunt one: “You’ve got money. You ever hear of a politician—any sort of politician—who didn’t need money?”
She laughed. “You’re right about that, heaven knows—and so do I, the hard way. I don’t know that I want to spend any of my money on the Freedom Party, but I don’t know that I don’t, either. Let me do some checking around and see if it would be money well spent. If I decide it is, I expect I can find a way to let Featherston know I want to have a talk with him.”
She spoke about the Freedom Party as if it were a firm in which she was considering an investment. In a way, that was probably just what it was to her. As far as Roger Kimball was concerned, politics and investments were two separate worlds. Maybe that meant Anne Colleton was the right person to approach Featherston after all. Kimball said, “All right, that’s fair enough. Thanks.”
When he didn’t say anything more, Anne teased him: “No sweet talk, Roger? Have you gone and found somebody else?”
“After you, anyone else’d be boring,” he answered. This time, pleasure filled her laugh. He went on, “I just didn’t reckon it’d work today, that’s all.”
“You’re a smart man,” she said. Getting such praise from her pleased Kimball much more than getting it from Clarence Potter had done.
Tom Colleton looked quizzically at Anne. He asked, “Are you really sure you want to do this?”
“What, meet with Jake Featherston?” she asked. Her brother nodded. She exhaled in some exasperation. “Seeing as he’s going to be on the train that gets to St. Matthews in half an hour, don’t you think it’s a little late to worry about that? If I show him up now, I’ve made an enemy. I’m liable to have made a dangerous enemy. I don’t care to do that, thank you very much.”
“I suppose you’re right—you usually are.” Tom still looked unhappy. “I can’t say I much fancy what I’ve heard about him, though.”
“Hush,” Anne said absently as she walked over to the closet. “I want to pick out the hat that goes best with this dress.” The dress was of orchid cotton voile, with a new-style square collar and with ruffles at the sleeves, waist, hips, and a few inches above the ankle-length hemline. It managed to be stylish and to suit the formidable South Carolina climate at the same time.
The flowered hat she chose had a downturned brim that was also of the latest mode. She didn’t know how much attention Featherston paid to fashion. She’d tried to find out what he thought of women; all she’d been able to learn was that he was a bachelor. Not being able to find out more left her obscurely irked.
“Are you sure you want to come along, Tom?” she asked. “One thing we do know is that he doesn’t love officers.”
“Next enlisted man I meet who does love officers will be the first.” Her brother pulled out his pocket watch. “We’d better get going, if you aim to meet him at the station.”
“Do you expect the train to run on time?” Anne asked, but she went with him.
As it happened, the train did run late, but only by twenty minutes or so: hardly enough time in which to start fuming. It pulled into the battered station—not all the damage from the black uprising had been repaired—with wheels squealing and sparking as the brakes brought it to a halt and with black smoke and cinders belching from the locomotive’s stack. Anne brushed soot from her sleeve with a muttered curse that made Tom chuckle and that no one else heard.
Only two people got off the train in St. Matthews. Since one of them was a fat colored woman, figuring out who the other one was did not require brilliance. The lanky white man dressed in butternut trousers, a clean white shirt, and a straw hat looked around for people to greet him, as any traveler might have done.
“Mr. Featherston!” Anne called, and the newcomer alertly swung toward her. His features were pinched and not particularly handsome, but when his eyes met hers, she had to brace herself for an instant. Roger Kimball had been right: whatever else he was, Jake Featherston was not a man to take lightly. She stepped toward him. “I’m Anne Colleton, Mr. Featherston. Pleased to meet you, and thank you for coming down. This is my brother, Tom.”
“Right pleased to meet you both,” Featherston said, his Virginia accent not bespeaking any great education. When he shook hands with Anne, his grip was so businesslike, it revealed nothing. He turned to her brother. “You were an officer on the Roanoke front, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, that’s so,” Tom said. I wasn’t the only one doing some checking, Anne thought. No, Featherston was not a man to be taken lightly, not even a little bit.
He said, “I’ll try not to hold it against you.” From the lips of most former noncoms, it would have been a joke. Anne and Tom both started to smile. Neither let the smile get very big. Anne wasn’t at all sure Featherston was kidding. He asked, “You have a motorcar here, to take us wherever we’re going?”
Anne shook her head. “I didn’t bother. We’re only a couple of blocks from my apartment. This isn’t a big town—you can see that. It’s an easy walk.”
“I’ll take your carpetbag there, if you like,” Tom added, reaching out for it.
“Don’t bother,” Featherston said, and did not hand it over. “I’ve been taking care of myself a long time now. I can go right on doing it.” He nodded to Anne. “Lead the way, Miss Colleton. Sooner we’re there, sooner we can get down to business.”
He was mostly silent as they walked along: not a man with a large store of small talk. As he walked, he studied St. Matthews with military alertness. He studied Anne the same way. His eyes kept coming back to her, but not in the way of a man who looks on a woman with desire. Anne had seen that often enough to be most familiar with it. No, he was trying to size her up. That was interesting. Usually, till they realized she had a brain, men were more interested in trying to feel her up.
Back at the apartment, Featherston accepted coffee and a slice of peach pie. He ate like a man stoking a boiler, emptying his plate very fast. Then he said, “What can I do for you, Miss Colleton?”
“I don’t quite know,” Anne answered. “What I do know is that I don’t like the way the Confederate States have been drifting since the end of the war. I’d like the country to start moving forward again. If the Freedom Party can help us do that, maybe I’d like to help the Freedom Party.”
“I can tell you what I want for the CSA,” Featherston said. “I want revenge. I want revenge on the damnyankees for licking us. I want revenge on the damnfool politicians who got us into the war. I want revenge on the damnfool generals in the War Department who botched it. I want revenge on the niggers who rose up and stabbed us in the back. And I aim to get it.”
Revenge was a word that struck a chord with Anne. She’d spent most of two years getting even with the blacks of the Congaree Socialist Republic after they’d torched Marshlands, killed her brother Jacob, and almost killed her. She dearly wanted to get even with the United States, though she didn’t see how the Confederate States would be able to manage it any time soon. Still…
“How do you propose to do all that?” she asked.
“You said it yourself: everything in the country seems dead right now,” Featherston replied. “The Freedom Party is alive and growing. People see that. They’re starting to come over to us. We’ll elect Congressmen this year—you just wait and see if we don’t. Before too long, we’ll elect a president.”
He had all the confidence in the world, that was certain. Tom remarked, “You’re not running for Congress yourself, are you?”
Featherston shook his head. “That’s right—I’m not. Don’t want to sit there, for one thing, on account of I can’t stand too many who’re already in. And for another, I want to be able to go where I want to go when I want to go there. If I had to stay in Richmond too much of the time, I wouldn’t be able to do that. So, no, I’m not going to the dance.”
“You’re going to stay on the sidelines and call the tune,” Anne said.
“You might put it that way,” Jake Featherston agreed. He had a pretty good poker face, but it wasn’t perfect. Anne saw his attention focus on her. It still wasn’t the look a man gave an attractive woman: more like the look a sniper gave a target. Now he’s realized I’m no fool, she thought. I wonder if I should have let him know so soon. I wonder if I should have let him know at all.
She also realized Featherston was no fool. Not running for Congress let him pick and choose his issues and what he did about them. It also protected him from the risk of running and losing. She had no feel yet for how smart he was, but he was plenty shrewd.
“What tune are you going to call?” she asked.
“I already told you,” he answered. “I don’t hide anything I aim to do; I just come right out and say it.” An alarm whistle went off in Anne’s head: any man who said something like that was almost bound to be lying. She kept her face quite still. Featherston continued, “Platform’s pretty simple, like I said. Pay back the USA as soon as we can. Clean out the House and Senate. Clean out the War Department. Put the niggers back in their place. Best place for ’em, you ask me, is six feet under, but I’ll settle for less for now. Still and all, this is a white man’s country, and I aim to keep it that way.”
“What do you propose to do about the black men who got the vote by fighting in the Army?” Tom Colleton asked.
“Most of ’em don’t deserve it,” Featherston said at once. “Most of ’em ran instead of fighting. I was there. I saw ’em do it. I fired into ’em, too, to make ’em more afraid of me than they were of the damnyankees.”
“Some did run,” Tom agreed. “I saw that myself. Toward the end of the war, I saw white troops break and run, too.” He waited. Slowly, Featherston nodded, looking unhappy about having to do it. Tom went on, “I saw some niggers fight pretty well. They’re the ones I’m talking about. How do you take their vote away?”
“Wouldn’t be hard, once we got around to it,” Featherston replied with breathtaking and, Anne thought, accurate cynicism. “Most decent white folks can’t stand ’em anyway. Besides, chances are the ones who fought hard against the USA learned how by fighting against the Confederate States. Pin that on ’em, call it treason, and hang the lousy bastards.”
“What do we do if the United States try to stop us from getting strong again?” Anne asked. “That’s my biggest worry.”
“We walk small as long as we have to,” Featherston said. “I hate it, but I don’t know what else to tell you. We build up our strength every chance we get, though, and before too long we get to tell the damnyankees to leave us alone unless they want a sock in the nose.”
That made sense to Anne. She couldn’t see what else the CSA could do, in fact, except become a supine U.S. puppet. She said, “So you want to get the Negroes out of the towns and factories and back to the fields, do you?” Would keeping Marshlands be worthwhile? No, she judged. Featherston had more on the ball than she’d expected, but the Freedom Party remained very new and raw. It sought power; it wasn’t about to lay claim to much yet.
Featherston answered, “That’s about right, Miss Colleton.” He eyed her again. Did he guess the calculation she was making? She wouldn’t have been surprised.
Her gaze flicked over to Tom. That did surprise her; she rarely relied on anyone to help her decide. Her brother shrugged, ever so slightly. He was leaving it up to her. He did that more often than not. She wished he wouldn’t have, not here. Featherston waited. He had more patience than she would have thought.
He had more of quite a few things than she’d thought. She wasn’t easy to impress, but he’d impressed her. She said, “I think we’re traveling in the same direction, Mr. Featherston. I suspect you could use some help along the road, too.”
“We sure could,” he said. “We sure could. When I joined the Freedom Party, it operated out of a cigar box. We’re better off than that now, but not a whole lot.” Contempt washed over him, as if poured from a bucket. “Most rich folks don’t dare change what made ’em rich. They’ll go on sucking up to the Whigs and the Radical Liberals while the country goes down the drain. Always good to find somebody who zigs when most folks zag.”
He couldn’t have paid her a compliment she appreciated more if he’d tried for a week. “I think I may be able to help some,” she said. “How much depends on any number of things.”
Featherston got to his feet, as if getting up on the stump. “Put those niggers back in the fields where they belong!” His voice filled the apartment with a raspy thunder that didn’t enter it when he was speaking in ordinary tones. That took Anne by surprise again, and for a moment almost took her breath away. She nodded, recognizing the good bargain she’d made. She held out her hand. Jake Featherston shook it. You give the speeches, she thought. Yes, you call the tune—after I whistle it to you.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling stared out across the prairie from General Custer’s third-story offices in Winnipeg. He’d been there with the general since winter, and the view on a clear day never ceased to astonish him. Today, he managed to put that astonishment into words: “My God, sir, it’s flatter than Kansas!”
“It is, isn’t it?” Custer agreed. “You can see forever, or if you can’t, it certainly seems as though you can. Makes you think God pressed an iron to the countryside hereabouts, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.” Dowling nodded. “Although, from what I’ve read, it wasn’t an iron at all. It was a great whacking sheet of ice that pressed the land down flat and didn’t pull back or melt or whatever it did till not so very long ago.”
“I can believe that.” Custer shivered melodramatically. “By the way the weather felt when we got to this place, I’d say the glacier had been gone about a day and a half—two days, tops.”
Dowling laughed. Custer rarely joked. Here, he might well have been kidding on the square. During several days that winter, the temperature never had managed to creep above zero, nor even get very close to it. There was a word for a place more than three hundred miles north of Minneapolis: Siberia.
But people lived here. Before the war, something like 150,000 of them had lived here. In Abner Dowling’s considered opinion, they’d been out of their minds. Oh, from May to September the weather was good enough, but that left a lot of time out of the bargain.
Nowhere near so many people were left in Winnipeg now. A lot had fled during the two and a half years in which Canadian and British forces had held the U.S. Army away from the critical rail junctions here. A lot more had fled when they realized the Canucks and limeys could hold the Americans no more. And a lot had died when the city finally fell.
One of the reasons Dowling could see so far was that the building housing Custer’s headquarters was one of the few in town to come through the war intact. Had it ever had any taller neighbors, they were rubble now. Nothing got in the way of the view.
A lot of the new houses that were starting to go up in Winnipeg these days were made from the wreckage of older structures. One construction outfit even advertised itself as BEST REBUILDERS IN TOWN. The company had plenty of material with which to work.
Custer said, “I feel as though I can see all the way to the Rockies.”
“I wish we could see all the way to the Rockies from here, sir,” Dowling said. “It would make our jobs a lot easier—and that’s where a lot of our problems lie, anyhow.”
“The broom didn’t sweep clean,” Custer said. “That’s what the problem is. That’s why they sent me up here to set things to rights.”
For as long as Dowling had known him, Custer had had a remarkable gift for revising events so they fit neatly into a scheme of things sometimes existing only in his own mind. The first part of his statement, though, was objectively true. The U.S. broom had not swept clean, nor even come close. The USA had conquered Ontario and Quebec, severed eastern Canada from the vast West by—finally—seizing Winnipeg, and struck north into the Rockies to break the rail links with the Pacific. That had been enough to win the war. But it had also left a couple of million square miles unvisited by U.S. troops.
A lot of those square miles, especially in the far north, didn’t have enough people on them to make anyone worry. But the cities of the Canadian prairie—Regina and Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton—resented having been handed over to the United States when no soldier in green-gray had got anywhere near them during the war. They seethed with rebellion. So did the farms for which they gave markets. So did the logging and mining towns of British Columbia. So did the fishermen of Newfoundland. So, for that matter, did a great many people in the areas the United States had taken by force.
“Confound it, Lieutenant Colonel, how am I supposed to control half a continent without the soldiers I should have lost during one medium-sized battle in the Great War?” Custer demanded. “Every time there’s a new little uprising somewhere, I have to rob Peter of troops to pay Paul so Paul can put it down. And then twenty minutes later Peter needs the men back again.”
“We have kept the railroads hopping, haven’t we, sir?” Dowling shook his head at the understatement. “The way the budget’s going in Congress, we ought to count ourselves lucky that we still have as many soldiers up here as we do. It won’t get any better next year, either.”
“Socialists!” As Custer usually did, he turned it into a swearword. “I tell you, Dowling, the machine gun’s most proper use is for shooting down the Socialist blockheads who want to cut our country off at the knees. Blow enough of them to kingdom come and the rest might come to their senses—if they have any sense to come to, which I am inclined to doubt.”
“Yes, sir,” Dowling said resignedly. He was a rock-solid Democrat himself, but not, he thought with a certain amount of pride, a political fossil like his superior.
Custer said, “If things get any worse, we’ll have to start borrowing soldiers from the Republic of Quebec, damn me to hell if I lie.”
Dowling started to laugh: for Custer to make two jokes in one day was well-nigh unprecedented. Then he realized Custer wasn’t joking. For a moment, he was inclined to scorn. Then, all at once, he didn’t feel scornful any more. Every so often, Custer came up with an interesting notion, sometimes without even realizing he’d done it.
“Do you know, sir, I’d bet the Frenchies over there would lend them to us,” Dowling said. “And do you know what else? I’d bet the soldiers from Quebec’d have a high old time clamping down on the Englishmen who sat on them for so long. That really might be worth looking into.”
“Take care of it, then,” Custer said indifferently. No, he hadn’t known that was a good idea. He’d just been talking to hear himself talk, something he was fond of doing.
Dowling scribbled a note to himself. “Have to make Quebec pay for the troops they send, too,” he said. “That will make Congress happy. It might not make Quebec happy, but I won’t lose any sleep over that. If we can’t twist Quebec’s arm, whose can we twist? If it weren’t for the United States, that wouldn’t even be a country today.” As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t much of a country, but nobody in Quebec had gone out looking for his opinion.
“Who cares whether Quebec likes it or not?” Custer said, which meant he’d thought along with Dowling, and which almost set Dowling wondering if he hadn’t miscalculated. If Custer agreed with him, he had a good chance of being wrong.
He said, “I think we have managed to put down the latest flare-up outside of Edmonton. That’s something, anyhow.”
“Putting down flare-ups doesn’t get the job done, Lieutenant Colonel,” Custer said. “I want to put them down so they don’t start again. One of these days, I expect we’ll have to raze one of these prairie towns to the ground. It’d serve the bastards right. And after we do that, the other Canucks will get the idea that we mean business.”
“Maybe, sir,” Dowling said, his tone plainly making that maybe a no. Sometimes you couldn’t be too plain for Custer, so he went on, “If we do that without good reason, the rest of the world will raise a big stink.”
“To hell with the rest of the world,” Custer said grandly: the philosophy of a lifetime, boiled down to eight words. Through the whole of his long span, Custer had done very much as he pleased. He’d had a good many breaks along the way, but no one could deny he’d made the most of them.
“Will there be anything more, General?” Dowling asked.
“As a matter of fact, there is one other thing.” Custer hesitated, which was most unlike him. At last, he resumed: “I’m afraid Libbie and I have had to let our housekeeper go. Could you arrange for the hiring of another one?”
“Wouldn’t your wife sooner take care of that for you, sir?” Dowling asked warily. When Elizabeth Custer joined her husband at a posting, she ran their household with a whim of iron.
Custer coughed a couple of times. “This once, Lieutenant Colonel, I’d like you to take care of it. Libbie is a marvelous woman—God never made a finer—but she does have a habit of hiring sour, dried-up sticks with whom I have a certain amount of trouble getting on well. I was hoping you might find a capable woman of cheerier disposition.”
“I see.” And Dowling did. Libbie Custer hired housekeepers in whom her husband could have no possible interest. That was only common sense on her part, for Custer did have an eye for a pretty woman. Whether anything more than an eye still functioned at his age, Dowling did not know. He didn’t want to find out, either. Now that Custer had a real command again, he didn’t need some pretty young popsy distracting him.
And Dowling didn’t want to anger Custer’s wife. Libbie made a far more vindictive, far more implacable foe than her husband ever dreamt of being. If Dowling hired Custer a popsy, she would not be pleased with him.
He had his own coughing fit. “Sir,” he said, “I really do think that’s something best left to Mrs. Custer’s judgment.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Custer said. “You handled such arrangements for me plenty of times during the war. Once more won’t hurt you a bit.”
“Whenever your wife was with you, though, sir, she did prefer to keep such matters in her own hands,” Dowling said. “I wouldn’t care for her to think I was encroaching on her privileges.”
“You’re not helping, Lieutenant Colonel,” Custer said irritably.
Dowling stood mute. If Custer ordered him to choose a housekeeper, he resolved to find the general the homeliest old crone he could. Let’s see you ask me to do something like that again, he thought.
But Custer gave no such order. Instead, he let out a long, wheezy sigh. “Here I am, in command of all of Canada,” he said, “and I find I’m not even in command of my own household.” Dowling wondered how many other famous generals had been defeated by their wives. A good many, was his guess, and he did not think that guess likely to be far wrong.