XII
Mary McGregor went about her chores with a certain somber joy. That had nothing to do with how hard things were on the Manitoba farm where she’d spent her whole life. It had a great deal to do with how hard the market crash had hit the United States. She hardly cared what happened to her, so long as the United States got hurt.
And, by all the signs, the occupiers did hurt. Fewer green-gray U.S. Army motorcars rattled along the road to Rosenfeld that ran past the edge of the farm. Fewer U.S. soldiers prowled the streets of the local market town. And the Rosenfeld Register, published these days by an upstart from Minnesota who used occupation propaganda as filler, kept on weeping about how hard a time people south of the border were having.
None of which made things on the farm any easier, only somewhat easier to bear. Things on the farm were desperately hard, and all the harder because Julia had married Kenneth Marble and gone off to live with him. She came back to visit fairly often, usually bringing Beth Marble, Kenneth’s mother, with her, and Kenneth himself stopped by every so often for a burst of work for which a man’s strength came in handy. Things weren’t the same, though, and Mary and her own mother both knew it.
“One of these days before too long, you’ll meet somebody, too,” Maude McGregor said over supper after a long, wearing day out in the fields. “You’ll meet somebody, get married yourself, and move away. I’ll probably have to sell this place and move in with you or Julia.”
“I wouldn’t do that!” Mary exclaimed.
Her mother smiled. “Of course you would. You should. That’s the way the world works. Young folks do what they need to do, and older ones ride along with it as best they can. I don’t see how we’d go on if things worked any different.”
“It doesn’t seem right. It isn’t right,” Mary said—she’d had that passionate certainty for as long as she’d been alive. After a moment, she went on, “If I ever marry anybody”—and the thought had crossed her mind more and more often since she’d passed her twentieth birthday—“he ought to come and live here and help us work this place. Then our children could go right on working it, years and years from now.”
“The trouble with that, you know, is that Julia and Kenneth, and their children when they have them, have an interest in this land, too,” her mother said.
“Julia doesn’t seem very interested,” Mary said. “She went off without so much as a backwards glance.”
“Julia doesn’t seem very interested now,” her mother replied. “How she’ll feel about things ten or twenty years from now—or how her husband and her children will feel—well, how can anybody know for sure?”
Thinking about what things might be like ten or twenty years from now still didn’t seem natural to Mary. She tried to imagine herself at forty, but no picture formed in her mind. That lay too far in the future to mean anything to her now. She wondered if Julia still felt the same way. Maybe not—with a husband at hand, she had to be looking forward to having children.
How children were begotten was no mystery to Mary, as it could be no mystery to anyone who’d grown up on a farm. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with the process was a different question. To let a man do that with her, to her . . . She shook her head. The mere idea was repulsive. But people did it. That was what being married was about. She knew that, too. If people didn’t do it, after a while there wouldn’t be any more people.
Sometimes that didn’t seem such a bad idea.
Her mother went on, “A couple of knotholes have popped out of the wood in the barn. I want you to nail wood over them when you get the chance, so the inside will stay warmer in winter. The sooner you do it, the sooner we don’t have to worry about it any more.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Mary promised. “I’ve noticed ’em, too, especially the one that came out right behind that old wagon wheel.”
“Yes, that’s the biggest one,” Maude McGregor agreed. “A good patch there will keep a lot of warm air from leaking out when the weather turns cold again—and it will.”
“I know,” Mary said. No one who’d lived in Manitoba any time from September to April could help knowing.
When she went out to the barn the next morning, she took care of the livestock first. That had to be done, and done every day. As soon as she’d finished, she went over to her father’s work bench. She cut a square off a flat board, then grabbed the wood, a hammer, and some nails and went to get at the knot that had turned into a knothole.
It was right behind that wagon wheel. She had to put down the tools and the patch to wrestle the wheel out of the way. “Miserable thing,” she muttered, or perhaps something a little stronger than that. Why the devil hadn’t her father got rid of it? Come to that, why hadn’t she or her mother in the years since her father died? She had no good answer except that there had always been more important things to do.
Once she’d shifted the wheel, she picked up the square of wood and the hammer and nails and advanced on the knothole. As she took the next to last step, she frowned. It didn’t sound right—she’d never known that reverberation anywhere else in the barn. It didn’t feel quite right underfoot, either. Ground had no business giving slightly, as it did here. It almost felt as if . . .
Mary bent down to look more closely at where she’d been standing. It just looked like dirt, with straw scattered over it. But when she scraped at it with her hand, she didn’t have to dig far at all before her fingers found a board—undoubtedly, the board she’d trodden on after moving the broken wagon wheel.
What’s that doing there? she wondered. Almost of their own accord, her fingers kept searching till they found the edge of the board. She pulled up. Dirt slid from the board as she raised it.
Under it was a sharp-edged hollow dug into the soil. And in that hollow . . . Mary’s eyes got big and round. In that hollow rested sticks of dynamite and blasting caps and lengths of fuse and some highly specialized tools. “At last,” she whispered. She’d finally found her father’s bomb-making gear.
The first thing she imagined was going into Rosenfeld, as Arthur McGregor had done at the end of the Great War, and blowing as many Americans as she could sky-high. She didn’t worry about getting caught. If it meant more revenge on the USA, she would gladly pay the price. The real problem was, she didn’t know enough about explosives to make a bomb that had any real chance of doing what she wanted it to do.
I can learn, she thought. It can’t be too hard. I just have to be careful. I’m sure I can figure it out without killing myself while I’m doing it.
“Thank you, Pa,” Mary said. “I’m sorry you had to stop. I’m even sorrier you didn’t get General Custer. But the fight’s not done. The fight won’t be done till Canada’s free again.”
She looked toward that old, broken wagon wheel. Suddenly, a wide smile flashed across her face. Now she understood why her father had never repaired it or got rid of it. It perfectly concealed his tools and explosives. Not one of the Yankee soldiers who’d searched this barn—and there had been a lot of them, for they’d suspected much more than they could ever prove—had thought to move it and see what lay underneath. She wouldn’t have thought of it, either, if she hadn’t had to shift the wheel for an altogether different reason.
She wondered if she could find anyone in the sputtering Canadian resistance movement who could teach her about making bombs. Then, almost as soon as the thought occurred to her, she shook her head. Her father had gone his own way in fighting the Americans, which meant no one had betrayed him. No one could betray him if no one knew what he was doing.
People told a bitter joke: when three people sit down to conspire, one is a fool and the other two American spies. That would have been funnier had it not held so painfully much truth. More than once, the Rosenfeld Register had exulted about plots that failed because one member or another gave them away to the Yankees.
Mary McGregor nodded to herself. Whatever I do, I’ll do it alone. That’s how Pa did it. He’d still be blowing them up if he hadn’t had bad luck. It’s my turn now. I’ll be as careful as he was, or even more so. Nobody will give me away, and I won’t give myself away, either.
Some people said even the big Canadian uprising of a few years before had been betrayed to the Americans before it broke out, that they’d been on the alert because of that. Mary had even heard some people with reputations as patriots had turned traitor because they’d fallen in love with invaders from the south.
She didn’t want to believe that. She had trouble imagining any proper Canadian falling in love with a Yankee. The Americans had ravished the country. Wouldn’t they be ravishing anyone in it who had anything to do with them? That was how it seemed to Mary. As far as she was concerned, nobody who’d betrayed the uprising deserved to live.
“Yes, that’s what I’ll do,” she said, as if someone had suggested it to her. Getting rid of traitors was the best way she could think of to remind the whole country that going along with the occupation had a price.
She wanted to go out and start planting bombs that very morning. She knew some names. She was sure she could learn others without much trouble. But she checked herself. You were going to be careful, remember? After nodding, she patched the knothole that had led to her discovery. Then she carefully concealed the hole in the ground once more, replacing the board, covering it with dirt and straw, and putting the old wagon wheel back where it belonged. When she was done, she looked hard at the ground and did a little more smoothing. Satisfied at last, she nodded and went on to cover up the other knots that had come out of the planking.
“Took you long enough,” her mother said when Mary came into the farmhouse. “I didn’t think it was that hard a job.”
“Sorry, Ma.” Mary had known from the minute she lifted the edge of the board and saw what lay beneath it that she couldn’t tell her mother about it. What would Maude McGregor do? Pitch a fit and tell her to leave the stuff alone. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. She was also sure she wouldn’t leave the stuff alone, no matter what her mother told her to do.
“Sorry?” Her mother shook her head. “Don’t you think you have enough other things to take care of? What were you doing, playing with the chicks? You haven’t done that since you were a little girl.”
“I know, but I was looking at them, and they looked so cute—and they turn into stupid, boring old hens so fast. I wanted to have some fun with them while I could. They act so silly.” Mary seized on the explanation with both hands. She didn’t like to lie to her mother, but preferred that to telling the truth here.
“Can’t afford to get sentimental about ’em,” her mother said. “They’ll go into the pot when they stop giving enough eggs to be worth their keep. Nothing like a good chicken stew on a cold winter night.”
“I know that, too, Ma.” Mary didn’t want to say anything to stir her mother up or make her start asking questions. Agreeing with everything Maude McGregor said was also liable to make her mother wonder, but not in any dangerous way.
Or so Mary thought, till her mother asked, “Are you all right, dear?”
Mary thought that over. After a couple of seconds, she nodded. “I’m swell, Ma. I’m the best I’ve been for a long time, matter of fact.” Her mother gave her a quizzical look, but not of the sort to make her worry. No, she didn’t worry at all. Everything was going to be fine now. She could feel it.
The Remembrance sailed west through the Straits of Florida, out of Nassau in the Bahamas—the formerly British Bahamas, surrendered to the USA after the Great War—bound for Puerto Limón on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The sun stood tropically high in the sky. The day was hot and bright and perfect . . . perfect, that is, for almost everybody aboard the aeroplane carrier except Sam Carsten.
No matter how hot and muggy it got, Sam had to keep his cap on and to jam it down as far down over his eyes as he could. A lot of officers went around in their shirtsleeves. He didn’t; he left on his white summer jacket, to protect his arms as well as he could.
His ears, his nose (especially his nose), and the backs of his hands were snowy white with zinc-oxide ointment. Even so, every square inch of flesh he exposed to the sun was red and peeling or blistered. He hated weather like this, hated it where most men reveled in it.
Like most men, Commander Martin van der Waal tanned readily. Oh, he’d burn if he did something stupid, but even that would only last till he stayed out enough to get his hide acclimated to the sun. The torpedo-defense specialist looked at Sam with wry sympathy. “You’d sooner be patrolling somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“Now that you mention it, sir—yes,” Carsten answered.
“Sorry about that,” van der Waal said. “They’ve got somebody else keeping an eye on the Royal Navy up there. We get to show the flag in what used to be a Confederate lake.”
“Not quite enough little specks of land in the Florida Straits to let the CSA claim this as territorial water and make us go the long way round,” Sam said.
“We would have had to before the war,” his superior said. “The Confederates thought they were little tin gods then. Now . . . Now I don’t care if they build themselves a bridge from Key West to Habana. We’ll sail right under it, by God, and thumb our noses as we go by.”
“Yeah.” Carsten smiled and nodded, liking the picture.
Down at the Remembrance’s stern, a sailor spun an aeroplane’s prop. The engine roared to noisy life. With a push from the steam catapult, the machine taxied along the carrier’s flight deck, descended for a split second as it went off the end, and then gained altitude and buzzed away. Another followed, and another, and another.
Sam said, “Of course it’ll be unofficial when they look over what the Confederates are up to in south Florida and Cuba.” He winked. “Of course it will.”
Commander van der Waal chuckled. “Yeah, and rain makes applesauce.”
But two could play at that game. Before long, a biplane came down from Florida and began flying lazy circles above the Remembrance. Not caring for the company, the aeroplane carrier’s commander ordered a couple of fighting scouts aloft to look over the newcomer and, if need be, to warn him off. Sam happened to be going by the wireless shack when one of the U.S. pilots said, “The Confederate says he’s just a civilian. His machine’s got Confederate Citrus Company painted on the side. He’s out for a stroll, you might say.”
What the officer inside the wireless center said meant, Yeah, and rain makes applesauce, but was a good deal more pungently phrased. The officer went on, “Tell the son of a bitch he can goddamn well go strolling somewhere else, or maybe he’ll go swimming instead.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot answered. Carsten lingered in the corridor to hear what happened next. After half a minute or so, the pilot came back on the air: “Sir, he says if we want an international incident from shooting down an unarmed civilian pilot in international waters, we can have one.”
The officer in the wireless center expended more bad language. At last, he said, “I’d better talk to the old man about that one.” He might have wanted to order the Confederate aeroplane knocked out of the sky, but he didn’t have the nerve to do it without approval from on high. Carsten wouldn’t have, either.
Maybe the skipper of the Remembrance used some blue language of his own. Whether he did or not, that CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY aeroplane flew above the carrier for the next hour and a half. Nobody fired a shot at it. The pilot finally ran low on fuel or got bored or found some other reason to fly back off toward the north.
In the officers’ galley at supper that evening, Sam said, “I bet they’re developing that bastard’s photographs right now.”
“Probably,” a lieutenant, junior grade, agreed. “Fat lot of good they can do with ’em, though. Maybe they’ve built a few submersibles without our noticing, and maybe than can keep ’em hidden from us, too—”
“Especially since the Socialists aren’t spending the money on inspections that the Democrats did,” a lieutenant commander put in.
“Yes, sir,” the j.g. said. “But there’s no way in hell they could build themselves an aeroplane carrier on the sly. That’s too big a secret to keep. Besides, they haven’t got the aeroplanes to put aboard it.”
“We hope they don’t,” Sam said. “For all we know, they’re all labeled Confederate Citrus Company right now.”
That produced a few laughs and a few curses. The lieutenant commander said, “That machine had no guns. The pilots checked, first thing.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. “But how long would they need to convert the type to something they could use in combat?”
Nobody had anything resembling an answer for him. The lieutenant commander said, “That’s something we ought to find out about. Maybe more of these fruit-company bastards will come look us over before too long. If they do, we’ll look them over, too.” He sighed. “I don’t know how much good that will do us, not the way things are in Philadelphia these days, but we do have to make the effort.”
By the next morning, though, they’d left the Straits and even Cuba behind. No more aeroplanes came out from the CSA to inspect them. Carsten was sure that didn’t mean nobody was keeping an eye on them. Lots of little fishing boats, some Confederate, others Mexican, bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico. How many of them had wireless sets? How many of those sets were sending reports to, say, the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, or to New Orleans? He didn’t know, but he had his suspicions.
He also had suspicions of another sort. Whenever he came up onto the flight deck, he kept staring out into the blue, blue waters of the Gulf. “What are you doing?” Commander van der Waal asked. “Looking for periscopes?”
“Yes, sir,” Sam answered, altogether seriously.
Van der Waal stared. “Do you really think the Confederates would try to sink us?”
“No, sir,” Sam said. “I think they’d have to be crazy to try that. But if they’ve got any submersibles, what better way to train their crews than by stalking a real, live aeroplane carrier?”
His superior pondered that, then nodded. “Good point, Carsten. Let’s see what we can do about it. Maybe we ought to get some training in, too.”
Before long, the Remembrance shut down her engines and drifted to a stop. Sam knew what that meant: she was giving her hydrophone operators the best chance she could to pick up the sounds of submarines moving on their electric engines somewhere under the sea.
What will we do if we hear one? Carsten wondered. The carrier couldn’t start lobbing depth charges into the Gulf of Mexico. That would be an act of war, no less than if one of the hypothetical subs launched a torpedo at her. We could report it to Philadelphia. How much good would that do? Sam didn’t know. But the Confederate States couldn’t claim they had no submersibles if the Remembrance found one.
Or could they? Maybe they’d claim the boat belonged to the Empire of Mexico. Sam doubted the Mexicans could build such boats on their own, or man them if they did, but how could you know for sure? You couldn’t. Subs under the sea were hard to find and even harder to identify; they didn’t come with license plates, the way motorcars did.
Nobody ever officially said whether the hydrophone operators found anything. Sam did get a letter of commendation in his service jacket for “enhancing the Remembrance’s readiness against surprise attack.” He drew his own conclusions from that. He also kept his mouth shut about them. Sometimes advertising you’d done something smart was a good idea. Sometimes it was anything but.
When they neared the Central American coast, a tiny gunboat flying the blue-and-white Costa Rican flag came out of Puerto Limón to greet the Remembrance. An officer at the bow hailed her through a megaphone. He looked just the way Sam had thought a Costa Rican would look, and spoke English with a Spanish accent. The gunboat, which might have been a toy alongside the aeroplane carrier, got out of the way in a hurry so the elephantine ship could advance.
Puerto Limón itself turned out to be very different from what Carsten had expected. He’d come to ports in Latin America before. He’d figured the people here would be like the officer: swarthy, most of them of mixed white and Indian blood, and Spanish-speaking. Instead, most of them turned out to be Negroes, and they used more English than Spanish. In their mouths, the language had a lilt that put him in mind of what he’d heard in the Bahamas.
A long line of black men carrying huge bunches of bananas came up the pier next to the one where the Remembrance tied up. They vanished into the hold of a freighter flying the Confederate flag, then emerged to go back down the pier lugging crates: whatever that freighter had been carrying here to exchange for the golden fruit (actually, the bananas going aboard were green; Sam supposed they would ripen on the way up to the CSA).
White sailors aboard the freighter stared over at the aeroplane carrier. To Commander van der Waal, Carsten remarked, “I wonder how many of those bastards were in the C.S. Navy during the war.”
“More than a few, or I miss my guess,” the other officer answered. “We’ve just given them some free intelligence.” He shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, sometimes.”
The Costa Rican officer from the gunboat came aboard a few minutes later. His white uniform was more festooned with gold braid than that of the Remembrance’s skipper, but he introduced himself as Lieutenant Commander Garcia. That tickled Sam’s funny bone. “I wonder what an admiral in the Costa Rican Navy looks like,” he remarked.
“You probably can’t see the cloth on his uniform at all, on account of the gold and the medals and such.” Commander van der Waal’s snicker had a nasty edge to it. “My little girl back in Providence likes to play dress-up the same way. Of course, she’s got an excuse—she’s only eight years old.”
But Lieutenant Commander Garcia said all the right things: “We are pleased to see this great ship in our growing port. We hope it is a sign of friendship between your great republic and our own. Costa Rica and the United States have never been enemies. We do not believe we ever have to be.”
Sam wondered whether the sailors aboard the Confederate freighter could hear Garcia’s words, and how they liked them if they could. Hope you don’t like ’em for beans, he thought.
When Abner Dowling went to the train station in Salt Lake City, a police officer patted him down before allowing him inside the building. Another cop, and a military policeman with him, went through Dowling’s suitcase. “Sorry about this, sir,” the MP said when he got to the bottom of Dowling’s belongings. “I do apologize for the inconvenience.”
“It’s all right,” Dowling answered. “Identity cards and uniforms can be faked—we’ve found that out the hard way. Now you know for a fact I won’t be carrying contraband onto the train.”
“Thank you for taking it so well, sir,” the military policeman said.
“No point getting huffy about it,” Dowling said. “You were going to search me any which way.”
He was dead right about that. Everyone who left Utah was searched these days, whether at train stations or at checkpoints along the highways. Since assassinating General Pershing, Mormon diehards had set off bombs from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. They were suspected in a couple of murders of prominent men, too, and of bank robberies to finance their operations. And so . . .
And so lines into the railroad station were long and slow. Everyone was searched: men, women, children, even babies in flowing robes. At least once, somebody had tried to smuggle out explosives hidden under baby clothes. Dowling only hoped the diehards hadn’t succeeded at that game before the U.S. occupiers got wise to it. Every suitcase got searched, too. Some, the ones suspected of false bottoms, also got X-rayed.
As Dowling took his seat in the fancy Pullman car, he marveled that any ordinary civilians at all got on in Utah. He muttered under his breath, a mutter uncomplimentary to the inhabitants of the state he helped rule. Utah had precious few ordinary civilians, and even fewer who were also Mormons. Up till General Pershing was killed, Dowling had dared believe otherwise. So had the administrators who’d been on the point of relaxing military occupation in Utah.
It could have become a state like any other, Dowling thought as the train began rolling east. They could have rebuilt the Temple, if they’d wanted to. But some damnfool hotheads made sure that wouldn’t happen. I hope they’re pleased with themselves. Utah won’t get out from under the U.S. Army’s thumb for the next ten years now.
He suspected the man who’d gunned down General Pershing—a man who’d never been caught—and his pals were pleased with themselves. Some people had a vested interest in trouble. If it looked as if calm threatened to break out, people like that would do anything they could to thwart it. And, as they’d shown, they could do plenty.
Colonel Dowling let out a loud, long sigh. He glanced toward the bed in his compartment. If he wanted to, he could take off his shoes—take off his uniform, for that matter—curl up there, and go to sleep. He didn’t have to worry about Salt Lake City, or Utah as a whole, for the next several days.
Unless the Mormons have planted a bomb under the railroad tracks, he thought. He knew that wasn’t likely. But he also knew it wasn’t impossible.
He shook his head, angry at himself. I said I wasn’t going to worry about it, and what do I do? Start worrying, that’s what.
He looked out the window. An aeroplane flew past, also heading east but easily outpacing the train. It was one of those new three-motored machines that could carry freight or passengers. Suddenly, Dowling wondered what sort of precautions people were taking at landing fields. A bomb aboard an aeroplane would surely kill everybody on it. Muttering again, this time a sharp curse, he scribbled a note to himself. Maybe the Mormons hadn’t thought of trying to bomb aeroplanes, the way they assuredly had thought of bombing trains. Maybe they wouldn’t. But maybe they would, too. He wanted to stay one step ahead of them if he could.
When lunchtime came, he made his way back to the dining car. He was about to dig into a big plate of spare ribs when a clever-looking woman with reddish hair going gray came up to his table and said, “Mind if I join you, Colonel Dowling?”
“I suppose not.” He frowned; she looked familiar, but he couldn’t place the face. “You’re . . .”
“Ophelia Clemens,” she said crisply, holding out her hand man-fashion. “We met in Winnipeg, if you’ll remember.”
“Good God, yes!” Dowling exclaimed as he shook it. “I’m not likely to forget that!” She’d come to occupied Canada to interview General Custer, and she’d just escaped being blown to bits with him—and with Dowling—when Arthur McGregor planted a bomb in the steakhouse where Custer ate lunch. “How are you, Miss Clemens?”
“Tolerable well, thanks,” the newspaperwoman answered. “Are you also heading to Washington for General Custer’s funeral?”
Dowling nodded. “Yes, I am. I would have gone anyway, but Mrs. Custer also sent me a telegram asking me to be there, which I thought was very kind and gracious of her.”
“Do you have any comments on the general’s passing?”
“It’s the end of an era,” Dowling said automatically. That he knew it was a cliché made it no less true. He went on, “He was an officer in the War of Secession. He was a hero in the Second Mexican War. He was a hero—probably the hero—of the Great War.” Even though he broke orders to do it. Even though he almost got himself court-martialed—and me with him. “And he was a hero all over again, when he was coming home to retire, when he threw back the bomb that Canadian tossed at him.” Every word of that was true, too. Dowling knew he would have died if General Custer hadn’t stubbornly, irrationally—correctly—believed McGregor was the man who’d been out to kill him. He added, “He lived to ninety, too. That’s a good run for anybody.”
“It certainly is.” Ophelia Clemens took out a notebook and scrawled in it. A waiter came by. She gave him her order, then turned back to Dowling. “May I ask you something, Colonel?”
“Go ahead,” Dowling replied. “What kind of answer you get depends on what kind of question it is.”
“It always does,” she agreed. “Here’s what I want to know: Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer always told different stories about what happened during the Second Mexican War. They’re both dead now. You can’t hurt either one of them with a straight answer. Do you know who had it right?”
“Do I know for a fact?” Abner Dowling remembered the quarrel he’d listened to in Nashville in 1917, right at the end of the Great War. Roosevelt and Custer had almost come to blows then, though one was in late middle years and the other already an old man. Dowling knew what his opinion was, but that wasn’t what Miss Clemens had asked. “Ma’am, I wasn’t there. I was a little boy during the Second Mexican War. Even if I had been there, odds are I wouldn’t have heard exactly what orders were given, or by whom.”
Ophelia Clemens gave him a sour nod. “I was afraid you were going to say that. I even talked to a couple of the surviving machine gunners—Gatling gunners, they called themselves—but they don’t know or don’t remember who did what when.”
“We’ll probably never know, not for certain,” Dowling said.
“What do you think?” The newspaperwoman poised her pencil over the notebook, ready to take down whatever pearls of wisdom he gave her.
“Not for publication,” he answered at once. The pencil withdrew. He still didn’t say what he thought. Instead, he added, “Not even as ‘a highly placed source’ or anything like that.”
The look she sent him this time was even more sour. “All right,” she said at last. “You don’t make things easy, do you?”
“Ma’am, Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer are dead, but you won’t find a senior officer who doesn’t have strong views about both of them,” Dowling said.
Ophelia Clemens nodded again. That did seem to make sense to her. “I promise,” she said solemnly. “And in case you’re wondering, I don’t break promises like that. If I did, no one would trust me when I made them.”
Dowling believed her. She was, from everything he’d seen in Winnipeg and here on the train, a straight shooter. She probably had to be, to get ahead in a normally masculine business like reporting. He remembered she’d told him and Custer her father had been a newspaperman, too. Dowling said, “Strictly off the record, I’d bet on Teddy Roosevelt.”
“I thought as much,” she said. “Custer was nothing but a phony and a blowhard, wasn’t he?”
“Strictly off the record,” Dowling repeated, “he was a humbug and a blowhard. But if you say he was nothing but a humbug and a blowhard, you’re wrong. He always went straight after what he wanted, and he went after it as hard as he could. When he was right—and he was, sometimes—that made him one of the most effective people the world has ever seen. The rest may be true, but don’t forget that part of him.”
Ophelia Clemens considered that. In the end, a little reluctantly, she nodded. “Yes, I suppose you have something. People need to judge a man by what he did, not just by the way he acted.”
“Custer did a lot,” Dowling said. “No two ways about that.” He might have managed more, he might have managed better, if he hadn’t become a self-parody in his later years. But what he had done would be remembered as long as the United States endured.
Dowling told Custer stories all the way from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., some on the record, some off. Ophelia Clemens wrote down what she could and either laughed or rolled her eyes at the rest. Dowling was sorry they went their separate ways after the train rolled into Union Station.
He paid his respects to Libbie Custer, who sat beside the general’s body where it lay in state in the Capitol. “Hello, Colonel,” Custer’s widow said. “We had a fine run, Autie and I. I don’t know what in heaven’s name I’ll do without him.”
“I think you’ll manage,” Dowling said, on the whole truthfully. He’d always reckoned Mrs. Custer the brains of the outfit.
“I suppose I could,” she said now. “But what’s the point? I spent the past sixty-five years taking care of the general. Now that he’s gone, what am I supposed to do with myself? I haven’t much time left, either, you know.”
With no answer for that—how could he contradict an obvious truth?—Dowling murmured, “I’m sorry,” and made his escape.
He marched in the mourners’ procession behind Custer’s flag-draped coffin. The general’s funeral was modeled on Teddy Roosevelt’s; Dowling found it strangely fitting that the two men, longtime rivals in life, should be equals in death. The only difference he could see was that no foreign dignitaries came to say their farewells to General Custer.
A bespectacled man hoisted a boy onto his shoulders. In the funereal hush, his words carried: “Look, Armstrong. There goes the man you’re named for.”
Custer’s final wishes—or maybe they were Libbie’s wishes—were that his remains be buried at Arlington, across the Potomac from Washington in what was now West Virginia. He would spend eternity with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert E. Lee, presumably, would spend it gnashing his teeth at having not one but two U.S. heroes take their final rest on his old estate.
“Well, to hell with Robert E. Lee,” Dowling muttered, and he felt sure both Custer and Roosevelt would have agreed with him.