American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (3 page)

  “Of course I’ll be careful,” she said now, as if she were the adult and her mother the worried, fussy child. “Pa was careful. He just . . . wasn’t lucky at the end. He should have got that . . . blamed General Custer.” However much she hated Americans, she wasn’t allowed to curse at the supper table.

  Her older sister nodded. “Who would have thought Custer would be waiting for Father to throw that bomb and ready to throw it back?” Julia said. “That
was
bad luck, nothing else but.” She sighed. She hadn’t only lost her father. Arthur McGregor’s failure had also cost her an engagement; the Culligans had decided it just wasn’t safe to join their son, Ted, to a bomber’s family.

  “Part of it was,” their mother said. “Mary, would you please pass the butter?” Mayhem and manners lived together under the McGregors’ roof.

  “Here you are, Ma,” Mary said, and her mother buttered her mashed potatoes. Mary went on, “What do you mean, part of it was bad luck? It
all
was!” Her mother shook her head. “No, only part. The Americans suspected your father. They came sniffing around here all the time, remember. If they hadn’t suspected, Custer wouldn’t have been ready to . . . to do what he did.”

  What he’d done by throwing the bomb back had blown Arthur McGregor to red rags; the family could have buried him in a jam tin. No one still alive wanted to think about that. “I’ll be careful,” Mary said again. She brushed a wisp of auburn hair back from her face in a gesture her mother might have made.

  Maude McGregor had reddish hair, too. Julia was darker, as her father had been.

  Maude McGregor said, “I just thank God you’re only thirteen, and not likely to get into too much mischief for a while. You know the Yankees will keep an eye on us forever, on account of what the menfolks in our family did.”

  “Alexander never did anything!” Mary said hotly.

  “They thought he did, and that was all that mattered to them,” her mother answered. “Your father never would have done any of the things
he
did if that hadn’t happened—and we’d all be here together.” She stared down at the heavy white earthenware plate in front of her.

  “I’m sorry, Mother.” Seeing her mother unhappy could still tear Mary to pieces inside. But she wasted little time amending that: “I’m sorry I made you unhappy.” She wasn’t sorry she wanted revenge on the Americans. Nothing could make her sorry about that.

  “We’ve been through too much. I don’t want us to have to go through any more,” her mother said.

  Maude McGregor quickly brought her napkin up to her face. Pretending to wipe her mouth, she dabbed at her eyes instead. She tried not to let her children catch her crying. Sometimes, try as she would, she failed.

  Mary said, “Canada’s been through too much. There isn’t even a Canada any more. That’s what the Americans say, anyhow. If they say it loud enough and often enough, lots of people will start believing it.

  But I won’t.”

  “I won’t, either,” Julia said. “I quit the schools when they started teaching American lies. But you’re right—plenty of people are still going, and plenty of them will believe what ever they hear. What can we do about it?”

  “We’ve got to do something!” Mary exclaimed, though she didn’t know what.

  Her mother got up from the table. “What ever we do, we won’t do it now. What we will do now is wash the dishes and get ready for bed. We’ll have a lot of work tomorrow, and it’s not any easier because. . . .” She shook her head. “It’s not any easier, that’s all.”
 It’s not any easier because we haven’t got any menfolk left alive to help us.
 That was what she’d started to say, that or something like it. And things would only get harder when winter of 1924 turned to spring and they would have to try to put a crop in the ground by themselves. Like any farm daughter, Mary had worked since she could stand on her own two feet. The idea didn’t worry her. Having to do men’s work as well as women’s . . . How could the three of them manage without wearing down to nubs?

  She didn’t know that, either. She only knew they had to try.
My father kept trying, and he
made the
Yankees pay. I will, too, somehow.

  Julia washed dishes and silverware and scrubbed pots till her hands turned red. Mary dried things and put them away. Yesterday, they’d done it the other way round. Tomorrow, they would again.

  After the last plate went where it belonged, Mary took a candle upstairs. She used it to light the kerosene lamp in her room. The Americans had started talking about bringing electricity out from the towns to the countryside, but all they’d done so far was talk.
More lies,
 she thought.

  She changed out of her shirtwaist and sweater and skirt into a long wool flannel nightgown. With thick wool blankets and a down comforter on the bed, she didn’t fear even a Manitoba winter—and if that wasn’t courage, what was? Before she lay down, she knelt beside the bed and prayed.

  “And keep Mother safe and healthy, and keep Julia safe and healthy, and help me pay the Americans back,” she whispered, as she did every night. “Please, God. I know You can do it if You try.” God
could
do anything. She believed that with all her heart. Getting Him to do it—that was a different, and harder, business.

  When Mary’s head did hit the pillow, she fell asleep as if clubbed. She woke the next morning in exactly the same position as when she’d gone to sleep. Maybe she’d shifted back into it during the night. Maybe she hadn’t had the energy to roll over.

  Once she crawled out of bed, the aromas of tea and frying eggs and potatoes floating up to the bedroom from the kitchen helped get her moving. She put on the same skirt and sweater with a different shirtwaist and hurried downstairs. “Good,” her mother said when she made her appearance. “Another five minutes and I’d’ve sent Julia after you. Here you are.” She used a spatula to lift a couple of eggs from the skillet and set them on Mary’s plate. Potatoes fried in lard went alongside them.

  “Thanks, Ma.” Mary put salt on the eggs and potatoes and pepper on the eggs. She ate like a wolf. Her mother gave her a thick china mug full of tea. Mary poured in milk from a pitcher and added a couple of spoonsful of sugar. She drank the tea as hot as she could bear it.

  Julia was already on her second cup. “How do the Americans stand drinking coffee all the time?” she wondered aloud. “It’s so nasty.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Mary said. She honestly believed she would have thought that even if the Yankees hadn’t done what they’d done. She’d tried coffee a couple of times, and found it astonishingly bitter.

  To her surprise, her mother said, “Coffee’s not so bad. Oh, I like tea better, but coffee’s not so bad. It’ll pry your eyes open even better than tea will, and that’s nice of a morning.” Hearing Maude McGregor defending something Mary thought of as American and therefore automatically corrupt rocked her. She didn’t quarrel, though; she had no time to quarrel. As soon as she finished breakfast, she put on rubbers and an overcoat that had belonged to Alexander. It was much too big for her, even though she’d nearly matched her mother’s height, but that didn’t matter. Along with earmuffs and mittens, it would keep her warm while she did the chores.

  “I’m going out to the barn,” she said. Her older sister shut the door behind her.

  Instead of heading straight to the barn, Mary paused at the outhouse first. It didn’t stink the way it did in warmer weather, but she would almost rather have sat down on a pincushion than on those cold planks.

  She got out of there as fast as she could.

  Several motorcars were coming up the road from the U.S. border toward Rosenfeld. The snow that scrunched under Mary’s rubbers sprayed up from their tires. They were all painted green-gray, which marked them as U.S. Army machines.
I hope something horrible happens to you,
 Mary thought. But the motorcars cared nothing for her curses. They just kept rolling north.

  The railroad line ran to the west of the farm. Coal smoke spewing from the stack, a train rumbled past.

  The shriek of the whistle, far off in the distance, seemed the loneliest sound in the world. The train was probably full of Yankees, too. More and more these days, the Yankees were tying the Canadian railroads to their own.

  “Damn them,” Mary mouthed, and went into the barn. It was warmer there; the body heat of the horse and the cow and the sheep and the pigs and, she supposed, even the chickens helped keep it that way.

  And the work she had to do certainly kept her warm. She gathered eggs and fed the animals and shoveled manure that would go on the fields and the vegetable plots when warmer weather came again.

  As she worked, she looked around. Somewhere in here, her father had made the bombs that did the Americans so much harm before one of them killed him. U.S. soldiers had torn the farmhouse and the barn to pieces, looking for his tools and fuses and explosives. They hadn’t found them.

 
  Of course they didn’t find them,
 Mary thought.
My father was cleverer than a hundred Yankees put
together. He just . . . wasn’t lucky with General Custer, that’s all.

  She picked up the basket of eggs, which she’d set on an old broken wagon wheel that had been sitting in the barn as long as she could remember—and probably a lot longer than that. She sighed. She didn’t want to go back out into the cold, even to take the eggs back to the farmhouse. Idly, she wondered why her father had never repaired and used the wheel—either that or got a few cents for the iron on the tire and the hub. He hadn’t been a man to waste much.

 
  If I had the tools, if I knew how, would I make bombs and keep fighting the Americans?
 Mary nodded without a moment’s hesitation, despite the thought that followed hard on the heels of the other:
if
they caught you, they’d shoot you
. More than most children her age, she knew and understood how very permanent death was. Losing Alexander and her father had agonizingly driven home that lesson.

  “I don’t care,” she said, as if someone had said she did. “It would be worth it. We have to hit back. We
have
to.”
One of these days, I’ll learn how. It won’t take so long, either. I promise it won’t, Father.

  She picked up the basket of eggs from the old wagon wheel and, however little she wanted to, went back out into winter.

 
F
lags flying, horns blaring, rails decked in bunting of red, white, and blue, the USS
O’Brien
came into Cork harbor. The Irish had laid on a spectacular welcome for the destroyer with the fortunately Hibernian name, with fireboats shooting streams of water high into the air. On the shore, a brass band in fancy green uniforms blared away. Schoolchildren had the day off. Some of them waved American flags, others the orange, white, and green banner of the Republic of Ireland—which, with U.S. help, had finally gained control over the whole island.

  From his station at the forward four-inch gun, Ensign Sam Carsten grinned at the celebration. He’d seen the like before, in Dublin. He was a tall, muscular, very blond man who burned whenever the sun came out, no matter how feebly. A cloudy day in Irish late winter suited him down to the ground. He didn’t have to worry about smearing zinc-oxide ointment and other things that didn’t work onto his poor, abused hide, not for a while he didn’t.

  He turned to the petty officer who was his number two at the gun. “They wouldn’t have been so friendly if we’d come in while the limeys were still running this place, eh, Hirskowitz?”

  “You’re right about that, sir.” Nathan Hirskowitz was a dour Jew from New York City, as dark as Carsten was fair. He had swarthy skin, brown eyes, and a blue-black stubble he had to shave twice a day.

  Getting called
sir
still bemused Carsten. He was a mustang, up through the ranks; he’d spent going on twenty years working his way up from ordinary seaman. If the officer in charge of the gun he’d served on an aeroplane carrier hadn’t encouraged him, he didn’t think he would ever have had the nerve to take the qualifying examination. He wished he were still aboard the
Remembrance
; naval aviation fascinated him, even if he was a gunnery man first. But the carrier hadn’t had any slots for a new-minted ensign, and so. . . .

  “Matter of fact, they’d’ve tried to blow our heads off,” Sam said. Hirskowitz nodded. Carsten scanned the harbor. Lots of fishing boats, some merchant steamers, a couple of old U.S. destroyers now flying the Irish flag, and . . . He stiffened, then pointed. “We’ve got company. Nobody told me we were going to have company.”

  Hirskowitz let out a disdainful sniff. “You think they’re going to tell you things you need to know just because you need to know them?”

  The
S135
was a German destroyer, a little smaller than the
O’Brien
, mounting three guns rather than four. The German naval ensign fluttered from her stern: a busy banner, with the black Hohenzollern eagle in a white circle at the center of a black cross on a white field. In the canton, where the stars went on an American flag, was a small version of the German national banner: a black Maltese cross on horizontal stripes of black, white, and red. As the
O’Brien
edged toward a quay, the
S135
dipped her flag in salute.

  A moment later, the American ship returned the compliment.

  “You see? They’re allies,” Nathan Hirskowitz said.

  In a different tone of voice, that would have sounded light, cheery, optimistic—all words noticeably not suited to the petty officer’s temper. As things were, Hirskowitz packed a world of doubt and menace into four words.

  “Yeah.” Carsten did his best to match him in one. Without a doubt, the United States and the German Empire were the two strongest nations in the world these days. What was in doubt was which of them was stronger. Officially, everything remained as it had been when they joined together to put Britain and France and the CSA in the shade. Unofficially . . .