The Victorious Opposition (68 page)

“Look here, General—I hope there won’t be a war, too,” Featherston said. “But one way or the other, the Confederate States are going to get what we want. We deserve it, it’s our right to have it, and we’re going to get it. Is
that
plain enough for you? Thanks to the Whigs, we’ve been waiting for almost twenty-five years. That’s too damn long. We can’t wait forever.”

“Yes, sir. Whatever you decide needs doing, we’ll try our best to give it to you,” Forrest said. “Doing that is our job. Figuring out what we need—that’s yours.” He got to his feet, saluted, and left.

Jake looked after him. As the door closed, he said, “I know what needs doing,” though Nathan Bedford Forrest III could not hear him. “And by God, I aim to do it.”

M
ary Pomeroy paused with a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to her mouth. “It’s not fair!” she said. “The Yanks let Kentucky and Houston vote on where they wanted to go, and now they’re back in the CSA. If they let
us
vote, the Americans would be gone from here so fast, it would make your head swim.”

Mort Pomeroy chewed up a mouthful of bacon—Canadian bacon, not the skinny strips that went by the name in the USA—before saying, “They let that Sequoyah place vote, too, and it voted to stay in the United States.”

Red curls flew as Mary tossed her head. “At least it had a choice. The Yanks don’t give us any.”

“I can’t do anything about that.” Mort ate another chunk of bacon. He might have been chewing on his words, too. After swallowing the bacon, he spat out the words: “And neither can you.”

She bridled. The Yanks had shot her brother for trying to do something about the occupation. Her father had fought a one-man war against the USA till his own bomb blew him up instead of General Custer, for whom it was intended. Mort braced himself, regretting what he’d said and getting ready for an argument. Before she could answer him, Alec spoke from his high chair: “More bacon?” He was wild for bacon and ham and sausage—anything salty, in fact.

“Sure, sweetheart,” Mary told him, and gave him some. While she cut it up for him, she wondered what to say to her husband. In the end, all that came out was, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I can’t.”

Mort blinked, plainly thinking he’d got off easy. He waited for her to come out with something else. When she didn’t, he decided to count his blessings. He finished his bacon and eggs, his toast and jam, and his tea. Then he got into his overcoat, hat, and earmuffs for the trip across the street to the diner. It was warmer today than it had been lately; the high might get up into double digits. On the other hand, it might not, too.

Mary also finished her breakfast. Then she let Alec chase little pieces of bacon around his plate with his fork as long as he ate one every so often. When it stopped being breakfast and turned into playtime, she extracted him from the high chair and carried him over to the sink so she could wash his greasy face. He liked that no better than he ever did, and he was getting big enough to put up a pretty good fight. But she was still bigger, and so, whether he liked it or not, the grease came off.

She read to him for a while. He liked
Queen Zixi of Ix
, even if a Yank had written it. She didn’t suppose L. Frank Baum had particularly disliked Canada. The book gave no sign that he’d ever heard of it—or of the United States, either. Hard to go wrong with a world so thoroughly imaginary.

When Alec started to fidget in her lap, she let him down to play. She didn’t have to watch him quite every second these days; he was old enough not to stick everything into his mouth the instant he saw it. That let Mary go into the kitchen and play with something of her own.

Alec wandered in to watch. “Whatcha doing?” he asked.

“Fixing something,” Mary answered.

“Is it busted?” he asked. “It don’t look busted.”

“Doesn’t,” Mary said. “It doesn’t look busted.”

“If it doesn’t look busted, how come you’re fixing it?”

Conversations with children could be surreal. By now, Mary had got used to that, or as used to the unpredictable as you could get. She said, “I’m not fixing it like that. I’m fixing it up.”

“Are you making it fancy-like?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m just taking care of what needs taking care of.” That didn’t mean much to Alec. It didn’t mean much to her, either. She didn’t care. It kept him from asking too many more questions, which was what she’d had in mind. She worked on it for a while, then put it away. Before too long, it would be done.

“Can we go out and play?” Alec asked.

“No. It’s too cold.”

“Can we throw snowballs? I’ll bop you in the nose with one.”

“No. It’s even too cold to throw snowballs.”

“How can it be too cold to throw snowballs?” Alec was disbelieving. “It’s not too cold to snow.”

“It’s too cold for people to go out there unless they have to.”

“Daddy went out there.”

“He just went across the street to the diner. And he didn’t stop to throw snowballs at anybody.” Mary still wondered how Mort had come to be
daddy
to Alec. Her own father had always been
pa
to her. She hadn’t looked for anything like that to change. But change it had.

“Sometimes Daddy throws snowballs,” Alec said.

Mary couldn’t very well deny that. They’d had a memorable snowball fight only a few weeks before. But she said, “He doesn’t do it on days like this. On days like this, he stays inside where it’s warm as much as he can.”

Alec went to a window and looked out. “There’s people out there.”

“I know there are people out there. Sometimes you have to go to the general store or to the dentist. Sometimes you have to deliver letters and things, the way the postman does.” The Yanks called him the mailman. Mary refused to. She’d been calling him the postman since she learned to talk, and she wasn’t about to change now. She still called the last letter of the alphabet
zed
, too. She wondered if Alec would after he started going to school. Yanks said
zee
, which struck her as insufferably . . . American.

“Do you have to go to the general store, Mommy?” Alec asked hopefully.

“No. I’ve got everything I need right here,” Mary answered. She wasn’t
ma
, either. She wondered why not. How had the language changed while she wasn’t looking? She couldn’t have said, but it had.

Cleaning and dusting here took only a fraction of the time they would have back on the farm. She didn’t have any livestock to worry about, either. How many times had she gone out to the barn no matter what the weather was like, to feed the animals and collect eggs and muck out? She didn’t have a number, but she knew it would have been a large one. Animals needed tending, rain or shine or blizzard. Back on the farm, if she had a moment to relax, it probably meant she’d forgotten something that needed doing. Here, she could sit down and smoke a cigarette and read a book or listen to the wireless without feeling guilty about leaving work undone.

Except for electric lights, the wireless was the best thing about electricity she’d found. And there were replacements of sorts for electric lights: gas lamps, or even the kerosene lanterns her mother still used out on the farm. What could replace the wireless, for immediacy or for entertainment? Nothing she could imagine.

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind, though, than she remembered a story the
Rosenfeld Register
had run not so long before. People were starting to figure out how to send moving pictures the same way they sent wireless signals. Apparently they’d broadcast pictures of a football game in New York City. But the sets cost more than a thousand dollars. Mary didn’t suppose they’d ever come down to where an ordinary person could afford them.

During the middle of the afternoon, she started boiling a beef tongue in a big iron pot. Tongue was one of her favorite foods. Alec liked it, too. So did Mort, but he preferred it with cloves stuck in it. Back on the farm, they’d always done it simply with carrots and onions and potatoes and whatever other vegetables they happened to have. Today she made it the way her husband liked.

He sniffed when he got back from the diner. “I know what that is!” he exclaimed.

“That’s nice,” Mary said with a smile.

“That’s very nice,” Mort said. “We don’t serve tongue at the diner. We can’t get enough of it, and not enough people would order it if we did.”

“Well, here it is,” Mary told him. “Sit down, make yourself at home, and it’ll be ready in a minute.” The way things turned out, making himself at home kept him from sitting down for a while, because Alec tried to tackle him. Any football referee would have thrown a penalty flag. Mort only laughed.

“And Mommy fixed something up in the kitchen,” Alec said, trying to tell Mort about the day.

“I know she did, sport,” his father answered. “And now we’re going to have it for supper.”

“No, something else. Something this morning,” Alec insisted. Mary wondered if Mort would ask more questions. He didn’t. Instead, he got Alec in a half nelson and tickled him with his free hand. Alec squealed and wiggled and kicked. Mary hoped he wouldn’t have an accident. That sort of treatment was asking for trouble.

But Alec didn’t. He was growing up. He’d start school pretty soon. Part of Mary reacted to that with surprise and horror, and not just because school would teach what the Yanks wanted taught. Where had the time gone? But part of her looked forward to getting him out of the apartment during the day. He really was starting to notice too much of what went on around him.

“Yum,” Mort said when he dug into dinner. Mary liked it, too, although she would have preferred the tender meat without cloves. To her, they distracted from the flavor; they didn’t improve it. And Alec made supper exciting when he bit into one and yelled that it was burning his tongue off. A swig of milk helped put out the fire.

The next morning, the sun shone brilliantly. The mercury shot all the way up into the twenties. Mary wrapped the box she’d been working on in brown paper and binder twine. “Come on,” she told Alec. “Let’s get you dressed up nice and warm. We have to take this to the post office.”

“What is it?”

“Something for your cousins, over in Ontario.”

Getting to the post office took a while, even if it was only three blocks away. Alec threw snowballs and made snow angels and generally had more fun than should have been legal. He had snow all over his front when they went in. It promptly started to melt, because Wilf Rokeby always kept his potbellied stove well fed with coal. The smell of his hair oil was part of the smell of the post office. He wore his hair parted right down the middle, the way he had when Mary was a little girl. It had been dark then. It was white now.

“What have we got here?” he asked when Mary set the box on the counter.

“Present for my cousins,” she answered, as she had with Alec.

Like any small-town postmaster, Rokeby knew a lot about what went on in his customers’ lives. “You don’t have a lot to do with ’em,” he remarked, “nor the rest of your family, either. Been years since I sent anything from you folks to Ontario.”

“I got a wire from them,” Mary said. “Laura had a baby.”

His face softened. “A baby. That’s nice.” He put the package on the scale, then looked at a chart. “Well, you owe me sixty-one cents for this.” She gave him three quarters, got her change, and took Alec back out into the snow.

J
onathan Moss got up from the table. He put on his overcoat and hat. “I’m going to head for the office,” he said.

Laura nodded. “I thought you would.” She gave him a quick, perfunctory kiss. “Do you really have to go in on a Saturday morning, though?”

“I’ve got to be in court Monday morning, and I’m not ready,” Moss answered. “If I don’t want to get slaughtered, I’d better know what I’m doing. Say good morning to Dorothy for me when she finally gets up.”

“I will.” A faint smile crossed Laura’s face. “I wonder where she gets it.” Their daughter loved to sleep late, a habit neither of them had.

“Don’t know. Wherever it comes from, I wish I could catch it. Well, I’m off.” Out the door Moss went. As soon as he closed it behind him, he dropped his right hand into the coat pocket where he carried his pistol. He didn’t do that where Laura could see him. It made her nervous. But not doing it once he was out in the hallway made him nervous.

No one lay in wait there. No one troubled Jonathan on the stairs. No one bothered him on the way to his Ford, which he didn’t park right in front of the apartment building. He examined the auto before getting in. It looked all right. Nothing blew up when he started the engine.

Maybe this is all so much moonshine,
he thought as he drove to the office. But he couldn’t afford to take the chance. What had happened to occupation headquarters in Berlin proved that. He might have laughed off threatening letters. Nobody but an idiot laughed off a bomb.

As usual, he chose a route to the office different from the one he’d used the day before. He didn’t park right in front of the building where he worked, either: he used the guarded lot nearby. All the same, the ends of his daily trips to and from work made him nervous. If anyone was gunning for him, those were the places where danger was worst, because he always had to be there. So far, he’d had no trouble. Maybe all his precautions were snapping his fingers to keep the elephants away. Then again, maybe they weren’t. The only way to find out was to stop taking them, and even that might not prove anything. He preferred not to run the risk.

Up the steps and into the building. No assassin lurking in the lobby. Up the stairs to his office, wary every time he turned. No crazed Canuck stalking the stairway. He opened the door, flipped on the light switch, and peered inside. Everything was exactly as he’d left it.

He closed and locked the door. Then he took care of the morning housekeeping: he made a pot of coffee and put it on the hot plate. Even though he’d had a cup with breakfast, waiting for it to get ready was a lonely vigil.

Meanwhile, the case ahead. Somebody—under occupation regulations, the military prosecutor didn’t have to say who—claimed his client had played an active role in the Canadian uprising in the mid-1920s. Why whoever this was hadn’t come forward years earlier was a question Moss intended to raise as loudly as the judge would let him. He’d been trying to find out who had a grudge against Allen Peterhoff. Somebody who stood to gain from Peterhoff’s troubles was the likeliest to cause those troubles.