American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (10 page)

  “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.

 
L
ucien 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?”