Clarence Potter paid two cents for a copy of the Charleston Mercury. “Thanks very much,” he told the boy from whom he bought it.
“You’re welcome, sir,” the boy said, the thick drawl of the old South Carolina coastal city flavoring his speech. He cocked his head to one side. “You a Yankee, sir? You sure don’t talk like you’re from hereabouts.”
“Not me, son.” Potter shook his head. The motion threatened to dislodge his steel-framed spectacles. He set them more firmly on the bridge of his long, thin nose. “I came to Charleston after the war, though. I grew up in Virginia.”
“Oh.” The newsboy relaxed. He probably hadn’t gone more than ten miles outside of Charleston in his whole life, and wouldn’t have known a Virginia accent from one from Massachusetts or Minnesota.
Holding his newspaper so he could read as he walked, Potter hurried down Queen Street toward the harbor. He moved like an ex-soldier, head up, shoulders back. And he had been a soldier—he’d served as a major in intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the war. His accent had aroused some talk, and some suspicion, there, too. Even men who knew accents thought he sounded too much like a Yankee for comfort. And so he did; not long before the war, he’d gone to Yale, and the way people spoke in New Haven had rubbed off on him.
Below the fold on the front page was an account of a speech by Jake Featherston, raising holy hell because Teddy Roosevelt’s bones were resting in the sacred soil of Virginia. Potter clucked and rolled his eyes and made as if to chuck the paper into the first trash can he saw. He would have bet Featherston would make a speech like that. But in the end, he didn’t throw away the Mercury. He opened it and read till he’d seen as much of the speech as it reprinted.
He clicked his tongue between his teeth as he refolded the newspaper. Featherston would pick up points for what he’d said. Damn Teddy Roosevelt and his arrogance, Potter thought. As far as he was concerned, anything that helped the Freedom Party was bad for the Confederate States of America.
He’d got to know Jake Featherston pretty well during the war. Featherston had made the fatal mistake of being right when he said Jeb Stuart III’s Negro servant, Pompey, was in fact a Red rebel. Young Captain Stuart, not believing it, had got Pompey off the hook, only to have his treason proved when the Negro uprising broke out a little while later. Stuart had gone into action seeking death after that, and, on a Great War battlefield, death was never hard to find.
General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a hero of the Second Mexican War, was a power in the War Department in Richmond. He’d made sure Jake Featherston, who’d been right about his son’s error in judgment, never got promoted above the rank of sergeant no matter how well he fought—and Jake fought very well indeed. For that matter, Potter himself had also been involved in uncovering Jeb Stuart III’s mistake, and he’d advanced only one grade in three years himself.
But his failure to get promoted affected only him. Had Jeb Stuart, Jr., relented and given Featherston the officer’s rank he deserved, the CSA would have been saved endless grief. Clarence Potter was sure of that. Featherston had been taking out his rage and frustration against Confederate authorities ever since.
I knew even then he was monstrous good at hating, Potter thought. Did I ever imagine, while the fighting was going on, that he’d turn out to be as good at it as he has? He shook his head. He was honest enough to admit to himself that he hadn’t. He’d thought Jake Featherston would disappear into obscurity once the war ended. Most men—almost all men—would have. The exceptions were the ones who had to be dealt with.
For the time being, it looked as if Featherston had been dealt with. Not so long before, his speech would have stood at the top of the front page, not below the fold. He was a falling star these days. With luck, he wouldn’t rise again.
When Potter got to the harbor, he stiffened. A U.S. Navy gunboat was tied up at one of the quays. Seeing the Stars and Stripes here, where the Confederacy was born and the War of Secession began, raised his hackles. The flag stood out; the C.S. Navy used the Confederate battle flag as its ensign, not the Stars and Bars that so closely resembled the U.S. banner. And the U.S. Navy men’s dark blue uniforms also contrasted with the dark gray their Confederate counterparts wore.
These days, Clarence Potter made his living as an investigator. He’d been looking into smuggling going through the harbor, and had headed there to report his findings to the harbormaster. But that warship flying the hated Northern flag drew him as a magnet drew iron.
He wasn’t the only one, either. Men in both C.S. naval uniform and in civilian clothes converged on the U.S. gunboat. “Yankees, go home!” somebody yelled. Scores of throats roared agreement, Potter’s among them.
“Avast that shouting!” a U.S. officer on the deck of the gunboat bawled through a megaphone. “We’ve got every right to be here under the armistice agreement, and you know it damned well. We’re inspecting to make sure you Confederates aren’t building submersibles in these parts. If you interfere with us while we’re doing our duty, you’ll be sorry, and so will your whole stinking country.”
They love us no better than we love them, Clarence Potter reminded himself. And that lieutenant commander had a point. If he and his men couldn’t make their inspection, the CSA would pay, in humiliation and maybe in gold as well. The Yankees had learned their lessons well; as victors, they were even more intolerable than the Confederates had been.
“Yankees, go home!” the crowd on the quay shouted, over and over.
At a barked order, the sailors on the gunboat swung their forward cannon to bear on the crowd. The gun was only a three-incher—a popgun by naval standards—but it could work a fearful slaughter if turned on soft flesh rather than steel armor. Sudden silence descended.
“That’s better,” the U.S. officer said. “If you think we won’t open fire, you’d goddamn well better think again.”
“You’ll never get out of this harbor if you do,” somebody called.
The U.S. lieutenant commander had spunk. He shrugged. “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. But if you want to start a brand new war against the United States of America, go right ahead. If you start it, we’ll finish it.”
No one from the United States would have talked like that before the Great War. The Confederate States had been on top of the world then. No more. The Yankees had the whip hand nowadays. And people in Charleston knew it. The crowd in front of the U.S. gunboat dispersed sullenly, but it dispersed. Some of the men who walked away knuckled their eyes to hold back tears. The Confederates were a proud folk, and choking on that pride came hard.
Potter made his way to the harbormaster’s office. That worthy, a plump man named Ambrose Spawforth, fumed about Yankee arrogance. “Those sons of bitches don’t own the world, no matter what they think,” he said.
“You know that, and I know that, but do the damnyankees know it?” Potter answered. “I’ll tell you something else I know: the way that bastard in a blue jacket acted, he just handed the Freedom Party a raft of new votes.”
Spawforth was normally a man with a good deal of common sense. When he said, “Well, good,” a chill ran through Clarence Potter. The harbormaster went on, “Isn’t it about time we start standing up to the USA again?”
“That depends,” Potter said judiciously. “Standing up to them isn’t such a good idea if they go and knock us down again. Right now, they can do that, you know.”
“Don’t I just!” Spawforth said. “We’re weaklings now. We need to get strong again. We can do it. We will do it, too.”
“Not behind Jake Featherston.” Potter spoke with absolute conviction.
But he didn’t impress Spawforth, no matter how certain he sounded. The fat man said, “He’ll tell the Yankees off. He’ll tell the niggers off. He’ll tell the fools in Richmond off, too. That all needs doing, every bit of it.”
One of Potter’s eyebrows rose. “Splendid,” he said. “And what happens after he tells the Yankees off?”
“Huh?” Plainly, that hadn’t occurred to Spawforth.
“The likeliest thing is, they take some more of our land or they make us start paying them reparations again,” Potter said. “We aren’t strong enough to stop them, you know. Do you want another round of inflation to wipe out the currency?”
He was—he always had been—a coldly logical man. That made it easy for him to resist, even to laugh at, Jake Featherston’s fervent speechmaking. It also made him have trouble understanding why so many people took Featherston seriously. Ambrose Spawforth was one of those people. “Well, what we need to do is get strong enough so the USA can’t kick us around any more,” he said. “The Freedom Party’s for that, too.”
“Splendid,” Potter said again, even more sardonically than before. “We tell the United States we aim to kick them in the teeth as soon as we get the chance. I’m sure they’ll just go right ahead and let us.”
“You’ve got the wrong attitude, you know that?” the harbormaster said. “You don’t understand the way things work.”
What Potter understood was that you couldn’t have whatever you wanted just because you wanted it. Even if you held your breath till you turned blue, that didn’t mean you were entitled to it. As far as he could see, the Freedom Party hadn’t figured that out and didn’t want to.
He also understood getting deeper into an argument with Spawforth would do him no good at all. The man didn’t have to hire him to snoop around the harbor. Yes, he’d been in intelligence during the war. But plenty of beady-eyed, needle-nosed men were at liberty in Charleston these days. A lot of them could do his job, and do it about as well as he did.
And so, however much he wanted to prove to the world at large—and to Ambrose Spawforth in particular—that Spawforth was an ass, an imbecile, an idiot, he restrained himself. Instead of laying into the man, he said only, “Well, I didn’t come here to fight about politics with you, Mr. Spawforth. I came to tell you about the fellows who’re sneaking dirty moving pictures into the CSA and taking tobacco out.”
“Tobacco? So that’s what they’re getting for that filthy stuff, is it?” Spawforth said, and Potter nodded. The harbormaster looked shrewd. “If it’s tobacco, they’re likely Yankees. I would’ve reckoned ’em some other kind of foreigners—goddamn Germans, maybe—from the girls on the films, but they don’t talk or nothin’, so I couldn’t prove it.”
“Yes, the films are coming in from the USA. I’m sure of that.” Potter looked at Ambrose Spawforth over the tops of his spectacles. “So you’ve seen some of these moving pictures, have you?”
The harbormaster turned red. “It was in the line of duty, damn it. Have to know what’s going on, don’t I? I’d look like a right chucklehead if I didn’t know what all was coming through Charleston harbor.”
He had enough of a point to keep Potter from pressing him. And the veteran, in the course of his own duties, had seen some of the films himself. He didn’t think the girls looked German. They were certainly limber, though. He took some papers from his briefcase. “Here’s my report—and my bill.”
Jonathan Moss hadn’t taken up the law to help Canadians gain justice from the U.S. occupying authorities. Such thoughts, in fact, had been as distant from his mind as the far side of the moon before the Great War started. He’d spent the whole war as an American pilot in Ontario, beginning in observation aircraft and ending in fighting scouts. He’d come through without a scratch and as an ace. Not many of the men who’d started the war with him were still there at the end. He knew exactly how lucky he was to be here these days, and not to need a cane or a hook or a patch over one eye.
U.S. forces had planned to take Toronto within a few weeks of the war’s beginning. But the Canadians and the English had had plans of their own. The U.S. Army had taken three years to get there. Almost every inch of ground around Lake Erie from Niagara Falls to Toronto had seen shells land on it. The city itself . . .
Having spent a lot of time shooting it up from the air, Moss knew what sort of shape Toronto had been in when the fighting finally stopped. It was far from the only Canadian place in such condition, either. Towns came back to life only little by little. Wrecked buildings got demolished, new ones went up to take their places. But the key words were little by little. Canadians, these days, didn’t have much money, and the American government was anything but interested in helping them with their troubles.
That meant a lot of people doing the wrecking and the rebuilding weren’t Canadians at all, but fast-buck artists up from the States. That was certainly true in Berlin, where Moss had has practice. (The town had briefly been known as Empire during the war, but had reverted to its original name after the Americans finally drove out stubborn Canadian and British defenders.) Americans in conquered Canada often behaved as if the law were for other people, not for them. Sometimes the military government looked the other way or encouraged them to act like that.
Moss had defended one Canadian’s right to reclaim a building he incontrovertibly owned—that it was the building where he’d had his office made the case especially interesting for him. Not only had he taken the case, he’d won it. That got him more such business. These days, most of his clients were Canucks. Some of his own countrymen accused him of being more Canadian than the Canadians. He took it as praise, though doubting they meant it that way.
And, when Saturday rolled around and the courts closed till the following Monday, he got into his powerful Bucephalus and roared off to the west. The motorcar did more to prove his family had money than to prove he did. The road to the little town of Arthur proved nobody in the province of Ontario had much money to set things to rights.
What had been shell holes in ground torn down to the bone were now ponds or simply grassy dimples in fertile soil. Rain and ice and grass and bushes softened the outlines of the trenches that had furrowed the countryside like scourge marks on a bare back. Even the ugly lumps of concrete that marked machine-gun nests and larger fortifications were beginning to soften with the passage of time, weathering and getting a coating of moss. Though cities were slow in recovering, the farmland in the countryside was back in business. Several trucks hauling broken concrete and rusted barbed wire back toward scrap dealers in Berlin or Toronto passed Moss on the opposite side of the road.
Here and there, fresh barbed wire stayed up: not in the thickets of the stuff used during the war, but single, sometimes double, strands. Signboards showed a skull and crossbones and a two-word warning in big red letters: DANGER! MINES! How long will those mines stay in the ground? Moss wondered.
From Berlin over to Arthur was about thirty miles. Even with his powerful automobile, Moss needed almost an hour and a half to get to the little farm outside of Arthur. That wasn’t the Bucephalus’ fault, but the road’s—especially after rains like the ones they’d had a couple of days earlier, it was truly appalling.
His squadron had been stationed at an aerodrome only a mile or so from this little farm. It had been stationed here for a long time; the front hadn’t moved fast enough to make frequent relocations necessary. And so Jonathan Moss, wandering the countryside in search of whatever—and whomever—he might find, had got to know a woman whose maiden name, she’d bragged, was Laura Secord.
She was named for a relative who’d made herself famous during the War of 1812, warning that the Americans were coming in much the same way as Paul Revere had warned that the British were coming during the Revolution. If that hadn’t been enough to make her a Canadian patriot, she’d been married to a soldier who was either missing or captured.
She hadn’t wanted to look at Jonathan. He’d certainly wanted to look at her. She was tall and blond and shapely and pretty—and she was more of a man than most of the men he knew. She could take care of herself. In fact, she insisted on taking care of herself. He’d come back right after the war ended. Her husband hadn’t. She sent him off with a flea in his ear anyhow.
But, when she was desperate for money to keep from being taxed off the farm, she’d written to him while he was in law school. He’d lent it to her. That had helped ease him into her good graces, though she’d paid back every dime. Helping that fellow over in Berlin regain his building had done far more. Any practical-minded American would say what happened mattered more than how it happened. Now . . .
Now, when Moss pulled onto the track that led from the road to her farmhouse and barn, he squeezed the bulb on the motorcar’s horn. The raucous noise made a cow look up from the long, green grass it was cropping. The cow didn’t act too startled. It had heard that noise before.
So had Laura Secord. Moss stopped the automobile just in front of her house. She came toward him, nodding a greeting. She carried a headless chicken, still dripping blood, by the feet. A hatchet was buried in a red-stained stump that did duty for a chopping block.
“Hello, Yank,” she said, and held up the chicken. “Once I settle her, she’ll make us a fine stew. Her laying’s down, so I don’t care about culling her.”
“Suits me,” Moss said. “How have you been?”
“Not bad,” she replied.
By a year’s custom, they were decorous with each other as long as they stayed outside, which made Moss want to hurry into the farmhouse. But this . . . Moss frowned. She sounded more—or rather, less—than merely decorous. He asked, “Is something wrong?”
She didn’t answer right away. When she did, all she said was, “We can talk about it a little later, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. Whatever you want.” Moss didn’t see what else he could say. He wondered if he’d done something to put her nose out of joint. He didn’t think so, but how could a mere male—worse, an American male—know for sure?
When they went inside, she gutted the chicken and threw the offal out for the farm cats, which were the wildest beasts Moss had ever known. She plucked the carcass with automatic competence, hardly looking at what her hands were doing. Then she got a fire going in the stove, cut up the bird, threw it in a pot with carrots and onions and potatoes and a cabbage, and put it over the fire to cook.
As soon as she’d got the chicken stew going, he expected her to throw herself into his arms. That was how things had gone since they became lovers. When they got inside the farmhouse, all bets were off. The first time they’d gone to bed together, they hadn’t gone to bed. He’d taken her on the kitchen floor. If she hadn’t got splinters in her behind, it wasn’t because he hadn’t rammed her against the floorboards.
Today, though, she shook her head when he took a step toward her. “We need to talk,” she said.
“What about?” Moss asked with a sinking feeling worse than any he’d known while diving to escape an enemy pilot. Whenever a woman said something like that, the first careless joy of two people as a couple was over.
“Come into the parlor,” Laura Secord told him. That surprised him, too; she hardly ever used the impressive-looking room. He’d walked past it on the way to the stairs that led to her bedroom, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually been inside it. What could he do now, though, but nod and let her lead the way?
At her gesture, he sat down on the sofa. The upholstery crackled under his weight; the sofa wasn’t used to working. On the table in front of the sofa stood a framed photograph of her late husband in Canadian uniform. Moss had resolutely forgotten his surname; thinking of Laura by her maiden name made it easier for him to forget the dead man altogether. But how could you forget someone whose image stared at you out of eyes that looked hard and dangerous?
The chair in which Laura Secord sat also made noises that suggested it wasn’t used to having anyone actually sit in it. She looked at Moss, but didn’t say anything. “You were the one who wanted to talk,” he reminded her. “I asked you once, what about?”
She bit her lip and looked away. Something close to a sob burst from her. She’s going to send me packing, Moss thought with sudden sick certainty. She can’t stand a damn Yank rumpling her drawers any more, no matter how much she likes it. What do I do then? he wondered, panic somewhere not far under the surface of his mind. He’d spent years alternately chasing her and trying—always without much luck—to get her out of his mind. Now that he’d finally got her, finally found out just how much woman she was, losing her was the last thing he wanted. But two had to say yes. One was plenty for no.
“What is it?” he said again, like a man bracing himself for the dentist’s drill. “After this buildup, don’t you think you’d better tell me?”
Laura nodded jerkily. But then, instead of talking, she sprang up to light a kerosene lamp. The yellow glow added enough light to the parlor for him to see how pale she was. Another thought intruded on him—she’s going to have a baby. He gave a tiny shrug. We’ll deal with that, dammit. Shakespeare’s first kid came along seven months after he got married. The world won’t end.
She sat down again, biting her lip. Moss’ nostrils twitched—not at the way she was behaving, but because he’d just got the first whiff of the stew. At last she said, so low he had to lean forward to hear her (which made the couch rustle again), “There’s going to be . . . an uprising. Here. In Canada. Against . . . against the United . . .” She didn’t get States out. Instead, she buried her face in her hands and wept as if her heart were breaking.
It probably is, Moss realized. “Why are you telling me? I thought you’d be . . .”
“Cheering them on?” Laura asked. He nodded, though leading them on was more what he’d had in mind. She said, “Because I don’t want you to get hurt. Because I—” She stopped again.
“Well!” he said, quite taken aback. He didn’t say anything else for close to a minute; what man wouldn’t savor such a compliment? She cares for me, he thought dizzily, and not just for my . . . He shook his head and asked the other question that needed asking: “How do you know about this?”
Laura looked at him as if he’d been foolish. And so I have, he decided. She answered as she might have to a child: “I am who I am—I am what I am—after all.”
“They thought you’d be cheering them on, too,” Moss said. “Cheering them on or helping them, I mean.”
“Yes.” In the one word, Laura Secord unwittingly spoke volumes on how close they’d come to being right. Then she burst into tears. When Moss tried to comfort her, she pushed him away as fiercely as if he were still the enemy she’d thought him for so long.
Lucien Galtier took life a day at a time. As far as he could see, that was a good idea for any man, and an especially good idea for a farmer like himself. Sometimes you got sunshine, sometimes rain or snow or just clouds. Sometimes you got peace. Sometimes, he’d seen, you got war.
Sometimes you got a whole new country. He still had trouble remembering he lived in the Republic of Quebec. The USA had invaded the Canadian province of Quebec and found enough men willing to detach it from its longtime home to make a new nation. Without the United States, my country would not be, Galtier thought.
That had been a very strange notion, the first time it crossed his mind. By now, though, he’d realized the United States did as they pleased all through North America. When they point at this one and say Come! he cometh, and when they point at that one and say Go! he goeth.
“That’s from the Bible, isn’t it?” his wife asked when he spoke the thought aloud to her.
“I think so, Marie,” he answered, scratching his head as he tried to remember where he’d found the language in which he robed his thought. He wasn’t a tall man, or broad through the shoulders; his strength was of the wiry sort that didn’t show. It was also of the wiry sort that endured after a bigger man’s youthful power faded with the passing years. He’d seen his fiftieth birthday. The only real difference between it and his fortieth was that he’d gone gray over the past ten years. He’d had only a few silver strands among the midnight at forty. Now the black hairs were the ones that were few and far between.
Marie, as far as he could tell, hadn’t aged a day. He marveled at how she’d managed that. She’d lived with him for thirty years now. If that wasn’t enough to give her gray hair, nothing ever would.
She said, “The Romans in our Lord’s day didn’t use their power for good, did they?”
“I don’t know these things,” Lucien exclaimed. “If you wanted someone who knows about Romans, you shouldn’t have married a farmer.” He raised a sly eyebrow. “Maybe you should have married Bishop Pascal.”
“You’re trying to make me angry,” Marie said. “You’re doing a good job of it, too. It’s not so much that Bishop Pascal can’t marry. It’s thinking I might want to marry him if he could. You could squeeze enough oil out of that man to light a house for a year.”
“But it would be sweet oil,” Galtier said. His wife made a face at him.
Before they could start up again, Georges, their younger son, came into the farmhouse with a newspaper from Rivière-du-Loup in his hand. “They’ve gone and done it!” he said, waving the paper at Lucien and Marie.
“Who has gone and done what?” Lucien Galtier asked. With Georges with newspaper in hand, he might settle on anything. Charles, his older brother, was much more like the elder Galtier, both in looks and character. Georges towered over his father—and also, as he had since he was a boy, delighted in whimsy for its own sake. Had someone gone and hauled a cow onto a roof? Georges might well make a story like that out to be the end of the world.
Not this time, though. “The Canadians have risen against the United States!” he said, and held the paper still long enough to let his father and mother see the big black headline.
“Calisse!” Galtier muttered. “Mauvais tabernac!” Marie clucked at his swearing, but he didn’t care. He reached for the newspaper. “Oh, the fools! The stupid fools!” He crossed himself.
“They’ll get what’s coming to them,” Georges said. He took the Republic of Quebec for granted. He’d lived the last third of his life in it. To him, as his words showed, Canada was a foreign country.
Things were different for Lucien. Back in the 1890s, he’d been conscripted into the Canadian Army. He’d soldiered side by side with men who spoke English. He’d learned some himself; its remembered fragments had come in handy in ways he hadn’t expected. He’d also been told, “Talk white!” when he spouted French at the wrong time. Despite that, though, he’d seen that English-speaking Canadians weren’t so very different from their Quebecois counterparts. And memories of when Quebec had been part of something stretching from Atlantic to Pacific remained strong in him.
“Give me the paper,” he said. “I want to see what they say about this.”
Something in his tone warned Georges this would not be a good time to argue or joke. “Here, Papa,” he said, and handed him the newspaper without another word.
Galtier had to hold it out at arm’s length to read it. His sight had lengthened over the past ten years, too. “Shall I get your reading glasses?” Marie asked. “I know where you left them—on the nightstand by the bed.”
“Never mind,” he answered. “I can manage well enough. . . . Uprisings in Toronto and Ottawa and Winnipeg, in Calgary and Edmonton and Vancouver.”
“The Americans say they are putting them down,” Georges said.
“Of course they say that. What else would you expect them to say?” Galtier replied. “During the war, both sides told lies as fast as they could. The Americans must have captured Quebec City and Montreal and Toronto half a dozen times each—and they must have been chased south over the border just as often.”
Georges pointed to a paragraph Lucien was about to read on his own. “The premier of the Republic is sending soldiers to help his American allies—that’s what he calls it, anyhow.”
“ ‘Osti,” Galtier muttered. He wasn’t surprised so much as disgusted. He’d been thinking of the Bible. The Americans were saying Come!—and the Quebecois were duly coming. Or was that fair? Didn’t allies help allies? Weren’t Quebec and the USA allies? Why wouldn’t French-speaking troops in blue-gray help Americans in green-gray?
“Can the Canadians win, do you think?” Georges asked. He certainly thought of his former countrymen as foreigners.
“No.” Galtier shook his head. “The Americans are soft in certain things—they have certainly been softer here in Quebec than they might have been.” Yes, he had to admit that. “But think even of your brother-in-law. Remember what he thinks of the British. The United States will not be kind in Canada. They will crucify the whole country, and they will laugh while they are doing it.”
“The Canadians are brave,” his son said.
“They’re foolish,” Galtier replied.
“Haven’t we seen enough war? Haven’t we seen too much war?” Marie said. Actually, this part of Quebec had fallen to the Americans fairly fast. It had seen occupation, but not too much true combat. Near Montreal, near Quebec City, the story was different.
“They don’t think so.” Georges sounded excited. He knows no better, Galtier thought. War around here hadn’t seemed too bad.
“Listen to this, son,” Galtier said after turning the paper to an inside page so he could see the rest of the story. “Listen carefully. ‘American occupying authorities vow that these uprisings will be put down, and all rebels punished under martial law. This is a rebellion against duly constituted authority, not a war; captured rebels do not have the privileges granted to legitimate prisoners of war.’ Do you know what that means? Do you understand it?”
“I think so, Father.” Georges, for once, sounded serious. He didn’t try to make a joke of it.
Lucien Galtier spelled things out anyhow: “It means the Americans will hang or shoot anyone they catch who rose up against them. They won’t waste time with a lot of questions before they do it, either.”
“And we take money from the Americans for the hospital they built on our patrimony,” Georges said. “We even have an American in our family.”
“You have a half-American nephew,” Galtier replied. “You have an American brother-in-law, as I have an American son-in-law. And Leonard O’Doull is a good fellow and a good doctor, and you cannot say otherwise.”
“Nooo,” Georges admitted reluctantly. “But if they’re doing these things in Canada—”
“They’re doing them because the Canadians have risen up,” Galtier said. “If the Canadians had stayed quiet, none of this would have happened. None of it has happened here in Quebec, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, tu as raison, Papa,” Georges said. “But even if you are right, is it not that we have made a deal with the Devil, you might say?”
That same thought had crossed Galtier’s mind, too. He did his best to fight it down whenever it did. Now he said, “No. We are a small man. The United States, they are a large, strong man who carries a gun. Are we foolish because we do not go out of our way to step on his toes? I think not.”
“Maybe,” his son said, more reluctantly still. Then he asked, “What time is it?”
“Am I a clock?” Galtier said. “You can look at one as easily as I.”
Georges did, and then exclaimed in dismay. “Is it half past four already? Tabernac! I thought it was earlier.”
“And why does the hour matter so much?” Galtier inquired with a certain ironic curiosity, part of which was about whether his guess was right.
Sure enough, his younger son shuffled his feet a couple of times before answering, “When I was in town, I heard there would be a dance tonight. I thought I might go.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, I did.” Georges attempted defiance. He didn’t do a good job of it. His older brother, Charles, or any of his four sisters could have given him lessons.
Lucien and Marie shared amused looks. They’d met at a dance, somewhere a little more than thirty years before. Nor were they the only couple in the neighborhood who had—far from it. Galtier said, “All right, son. Have a good time.”
Georges started to argue, to protest. Then he really heard what his father had said. He blinked. “It’s all right?” he asked suspiciously.
“I said so, didn’t I?”
Marie added, “There’s plenty of hot water on the stove, if you have time to bathe and shave before you go.”
“Merci, chère Maman. I’ll do that quick as a wink.” Georges still looked as if he didn’t trust his ears. He went off to the kitchen to take the hot water to the bathroom, still scratching his head.
When he was, or at least might have been, out of earshot, Marie said, “High time he got married. I began to worry about Charles when he waited so long.”
“Madeleine Boileau is a nice girl, and she made him a good match this past winter,” Galtier said. His wife nodded. He went on, “She is a better match than we could have got without our American doctor son-in-law, or without the money from the Americans for the property on which the hospital stands.”
“I know that,” Marie said. “You must know it, too. Why bring it up now? We’ve had these things for some time.”
“Why bring it up now?” Galtier echoed. “To convince myself what we’ve done is worthwhile, that’s why. Because there are times when I feel our money is like Judas’ thirty pieces of silver, that’s why. Because I almost envy the Canadians for rising, that’s why.”
Marie eyed him. “Would you disown your grandson?”
“No. Never.” Lucien didn’t hesitate. He did laugh. “All right. You have me.”
“I should hope so,” Marie said.