Breakthroughs

VI

Going home. Going home. Going home. The rails sang a sweet song in Jefferson Pinkard’s ears as the wheels of the train clicked over them. He’d been away too long, too far. He couldn’t wait to see Emily’s smiling face now that he’d finally got himself enough leave time to escape the front and travel back to Birmingham for a few days.

He couldn’t wait to see all of her, every inch, stretched out bare on their bed. He couldn’t wait to feel her underneath him on that bed, or on her hands and knees as they coupled like hunting hounds, or on her knees in front of him, red-gold hair spilling down over her face as she leaned forward and-

He shifted on the hard second-class seat. He was hard himself, and hoped the little old lady reading a sentimental novel next to him didn’t notice. He couldn’t help getting hard when he thought about Emily. Christ, she loved to do it! So did he, with her. When he’d got short leaves in Texas, he hadn’t felt any great urge to visit the whorehouses that did not officially exist. But Emily-Emily was something very special in the line of women.

She’d probably kick his legs out from under him as soon as he walked in the door. She’d gone without as long as he had. From her letters, she might have missed it even more than he did. “Very special,” he muttered. The woman beside him looked up from her novel, realized he hadn’t been talking to her, and began to read again.

Pinkard had the seat closer to the window. He found the Mississippi countryside more interesting than a book. Here, away from the front, the war seemed forgotten. He’d seen that as soon as the first train he’d boarded got more than an hour’s travel away from the trenches. Farmers were plowing in the fields. Actually, more farmers’ wives were in the fields than he would have seen before the war. That was a change, but only a small one when set against the absence of trenches and shell holes and artillery pieces. Everything was so green and fresh-looking, the way a landscape got to be when it wasn’t drastically revised every few days or every few minutes.

When the train rolled through a town, factory smokestacks sent black plumes of smoke into the air. The first time Jeff saw those plumes, he was alarmed; they put him in mind of fires after bombardments. But he quickly stopped worrying about that: industry got to seem normal in a hurry.

Past Columbus, Mississippi, and into Alabama the train rolled. Here and there, Pinkard did note scars on the landscape in this part of the countryside, half-healed ones from the Negro uprisings the year before. This was cotton country, with many Negroes and few whites.

Somebody a couple of rows in front of Pinkard said, “I hear tell the niggers is still shootin’ at trains every now and again.”

“Ought to do some shootin’ at them with the biggest guns we got,” the stranger’s seatmate answered.

Remembering his own train ride into Georgia and the bullets that had slammed into the cars from out of the night, Pinkard understood how that fellow felt. He’d been a new, raw soldier then, his uniform a dark, proper butternut, not faded to the color of coffee with too much cream. The fire from the Red Negroes had seemed intense, deadly, terrifying. He wondered what it would seem like now. Probably not so much of a much.

Darkness fell as the train rattled through the central-Alabama cotton fields. Jeff revised his thinking. If black diehards had fired a couple of belts of ammunition at this train, he would have been terrified all over again. If somebody was shooting at you and you couldn’t shoot back, terror made perfect sense.

He leaned back in the hard, uncomfortable seat and closed his eyes. He was only going to relax for a little while. So he told himself, but the next thing he knew, the conductor was shouting, “Birmingham! All out for Birmingham!”

He pushed past the gray-haired woman, who was going on farther east. As soon as he stepped out on the platform, he knew he was home again. The smoky, sulfurous air that poured from the foundries mingled with the fog that so often stole through Jones Valley to yield an atmosphere with density and character: damp and heavy and smelly, a mud bath for the lungs.

Flame poured from the tops of the chimneys of the Sloss Works, out toward the eastern edge of town. Back before the war-back before the Conscription Bureau had dragged him out of the foundry and into the trenches-he’d thought of that sight as hell on earth. Now that he’d seen war, he knew better, but the memory lingered.

Before he could get off the platform, he showed his papers to a military policeman who had to be counting his blessings at having a post hundreds of miles from the real war. The fellow inspected them, then waved him on. Trolley lines ran close by the station, taking travelers wherever they needed to go in the city. Pinkard stood at the corner and waited for the Sloss Works car he could ride out to the company housing-yellow cottages for white men and their families, primer-red for Negroes-surrounding the Sloss Works themselves. He yawned. He was still sleepy despite the nap, but figured the sight of Emily would wake him up in short order when he got home.

The trolley driver-who’d leaned crutches behind his seat and had one empty trouser leg-worked the brake and brought the car squealing to a halt at the edge of the company town. He nodded to Jefferson Pinkard as the soldier got off. Jeff nodded back. He felt the driver’s eyes on him as he walked away. Did the fellow hate him for his long, smooth strides? How could anyone blame him if he did?

Everything was quiet as Jeff headed home. Most of the cottages were dark, with men away for the war or working the evening shift or asleep if they worked days or nights. Here and there, lamplight yellow as melted butter spilled out of windows. A couple of dogs barked as Pinkard passed their houses. One of them, chained in the front yard, rushed at him, but the chain kept the big-mouthed, skinny brute from reaching the sidewalk.

Jeff turned onto his little lane. He felt swept back in time to the days before the war. How many times he’d walked this way with Bedford Cunningham, his next-door neighbor and best friend, both of them tired and hot and sweaty in their overalls after a long day’s work. Alabama had been dry for a few years, but home-brew beer never got hard to come by. A couple of bottles out of the icebox went down sweet, no doubt about it.

There stood the Cunningham house, dark and still. Pinkard sighed. Bedford had gone to war before he did, and had come back without an arm, as the trolley driver had come back without a leg. A one-armed man could do a lot of things, but going back on the foundry floor probably wasn’t one of them. Bedford and Fanny had hard times. Jeff wondered how long they’d be able to stay in company housing if Bedford wasn’t in the Army and couldn’t work for the company any more.

Lamplight shone from the curtained window of Pinkard’s own house, just past the Cunninghams’. He kicked at the sidewalk in mild disappointment. He’d expected Emily would already be asleep; come morning, she’d have to head downtown toward her munitions-plant job. He’d hoped he could take off his uniform in the front room, slip naked into bed beside her, and startle her awake the best way he knew how.

Even knowing she was awake, he went up the walk on tiptoe. If he couldn’t give her the best surprise possible, he’d still give her the biggest surprise he could. His thumb and palm closed on the doorknob. Gently, gently, he turned it. The door swung open without a squeak. He was glad Emily had kept the hinges oiled. In Birmingham, anything that didn’t get oiled rusted.

The lamplight glinted off Emily’s shining hair. Seeing that before he saw anything else, Jeff began, “Hey, darlin’, I’m…home.” What had started as a glad cry ended as a hiss, like air escaping from a punctured inner tube.

Emily half sat, half knelt on the floor in front of the divan. On the divan, his legs splayed wide, lolled Bedford Cunningham. Neither of them wore any more than they’d been born with. Her face had been in his lap till she pulled away at the sound of Jeff’s voice. A thin, bright line of saliva ran down her chin from a corner of her lower lip.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Cunningham said. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.” The short stump of his right arm jerked and twisted, as if he’d tried to make a fist with a hand he’d forgotten he didn’t have. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“Close the door, Jeff,” Emily said. Her eyes were wide and staring. She sounded eerily self-possessed, like somebody who’d just staggered out of a train wreck.

Mechanically, Pinkard did. He was stunned, too, and said the first thing that popped into his mind: “You sneak out of Fanny’s bed to come over here, Bedford?”

Cunningham shook his head. “She’s workin’ second shift these days.” His face was pale as skimmed milk. Before he was hurt, he’d been as big and strong and ruddy and bold as Pinkard. Now he looked thinner, older, his face lined as it hadn’t been when he was a whole man.

Jeff’s wits began to work. “Get your clothes on. Get the hell out of here. I ain’t gonna lick a crippled man.” He didn’t say a word about what he’d do, or wouldn’t do, to Emily.

Bedford Cunningham put on drawers and trousers and shirt one-handed with a speed that showed both practice and desperation. He hadn’t been wearing shoes. He darted out the door. A few seconds later, the door to his own cottage opened and closed.

“Why?” Jefferson Pinkard asked the age-old question of the husband betrayed.

Naked still, Emily shrugged. Her breasts, firm and pink-tipped, bobbled briefly. She was, Jeff saw, over the jaundice that troubled some munitions workers who handled cordite too much. “Why?” she echoed, and shrugged again. “You weren’t here. I missed you. I missed it. Finally, I missed it so much I couldn’t stand it any more, and so-” Yet another shrug.

“But Bedford-” My best friend! was another husbandly howl as old as time.

Emily got to her feet in a smooth, graceful motion Jeff couldn’t possibly have imitated. She walked up to him and took his hands in hers. He knew what she was doing. He could hardly have helped knowing what she was doing. “He was here, that’s all, darlin’,” she said. “If you’d been here, too, I never would’ve looked at him. You know that’s so. But you was in Georgia and Texas and all them damn places, and-” She shrugged one more time. Her nipples barely brushed the breast of his tunic.

No, he could hardly have helped knowing what she was doing. That didn’t mean it didn’t work. His breath caught in his throat. His heart thuttered. He’d missed it, too, but he hadn’t realized-he hadn’t had the faintest notion-how much till she stood bare before him.

She took a step backwards, still holding his hands. He took a step forward, after her. She took another step, and another, leading him back to the divan. When he sat, it was where Bedford Cunningham had sat before him. She sprawled beside him. She had two hands to undo his belt buckle and the buttons of his fly.

She didn’t kiss him on the lips. That might have reminded him where her mouth had just been. Instead, she leaned over and lowered her head. He pressed her down on him, his hands tangling in her thick hair. She gagged a little, but did not pull away.

Moments later, he exploded. He let Emily pull back far enough to gulp convulsively. Then, unasked, she returned to what she’d been doing. He stiffened again, faster than he would have believed he could. When he was hard, she got up on her knees and swung her right leg over him, as if she were mounting a horse. She impaled herself on him and began to ride.

Her cries of joy must have wakened half the neighborhood. Then, throatily, she added, “I never made noise like that for Bedford.” Jeff’s hands clutched her meaty buttocks till she whimpered in pain and pleasure mixed. He drove deep into her, again and again. And, as he groaned and shuddered in the most exquisite pleasure he’d ever known, he wished with all his soul he were back in a muddy trench in Texas, under artillery bombardment from the Yankees.

Sweat ran down George Enos’ face. The sun stood higher in the sky than it had any business doing at this season of the year, at least to his way of thinking. The USS Ericsson was down in the tropics now, nosing around after the submarines making life miserable for the warships and freighters that were trying to strangle the trade route between Argentina and England.

“What do you think?” he asked Carl Sturtevant. “Are we after English boats, or are the Rebs out here giving their pals a hand?”

“Damned if I know,” answered the petty officer who ran the depth-charge launcher. “Damned if I care, either. Knowing who they are doesn’t change how I do my job. We keep them too busy either going after us or trying to get away from us, they aren’t going to be able to do anything else.”

“Yeah,” Enos said. “Just between you and me, I’d sooner see ’em trying to get away than going after us.”

Sturtevant looked him up and down. “Any fool can see you ain’t a career Navy man,” he said after a brief pause for thought.

“Screw you and the destroyer you rode in on,” Enos returned evenly. “I’ve been captured by a Confederate commerce raider, I’ve sailed on a fishing boat that was nothing but a decoy for Rebel subs and helped sink one of the bastards, I was on the bank of the Cumberland when my river monitor got blown sky-high, and I was right here when the damn Snook damn near torpedoed us. To my way of thinking, I’ve earned a little peace and quiet.”

“Everybody’s earned a little peace and quiet, and in the end everybody gets it, too,” the petty officer said: “nice plot of ground, about six feet by three feet by six feet under. Till then, I want my time lively as can be.”

Enos grunted, then went back to what he’d been doing: watching the ocean for signs of a periscope or anything else suspicious. Everyone who didn’t have some other duty specifically assigned came up on deck and stood by the rail, scanning the ocean for the telltale feather of foam following a submersible’s periscope.

A shadow on the water-George’s pulse raced. Was that the top of an enemy conning tower, hiding down there below the surface of the sea? He relaxed, for the shadow was far too small and far too swift to be any such thing. He raised his gaze from the ocean to the sky. Sure enough, a frigate bird with a wingspan not much smaller than that of an aeroplane glided away. Several sea birds-gulls and terns and more exotic tropical types Enos had had to have named for him-hung with the Ericsson, scrounging garbage. They seemed perfectly content hundreds of miles from land in any direction.

George peered and peered. A man could only watch the ocean for a couple of hours at a stretch. After that, his attention started to wander. He saw things that weren’t there, which wasn’t so bad, and didn’t see things that were, which was. Miss a periscope and the sea birds would pick meat from your bones after your corpse floated up to the surface.

What was that, there off the port bow? More likely than not, far more likely than not, it was just a bit of chop. He kept watching it. It wasn’t moving in the same direction as the rest of the chop, nor at quite the same speed. He frowned. He’d spent as much time on the ocean as any career Navy man. He knew how far from smooth and uniform it was. Still-

He pointed. “What do you make of that?” he asked Sturtevant.

The petty officer had been looking more nearly amidships. Now his gaze followed Enos’ outthrust finger. “Where? Out about a mile?” His pale eyes narrowed; he shielded them from sun and glare with the palm of his right hand.

“Yeah, about that,” George answered.

“That’s a goddamn periscope, or I’m a Rebel.” Sturtevant started pointing, too, and yelling at the top of his lungs. An officer with binoculars came running. He pointed them in the direction Sturtevant gave him. After a moment, he started yelling like a man possessed.

At his yells, klaxons started hooting. George Enos and Carl Sturtevant sprinted for their battle stations at the stern of the Ericsson. The destroyer shuddered under them as the engines suddenly ran up to full emergency power. Great gouts of smoke belched from the stacks.

“Torpedo in the water!” somebody screamed. The Ericsson had begun a turn toward the submersible, which meant that George could not see the wake of the torpedo as it sped toward the destroyer. He couldn’t have done anything about it had he been able to see it, but being ignorant of whether he would live or die came hard.

Time stretched. The torpedo couldn’t have taken more than a minute-a minute and a half at the most-to speed from the submersible to the destroyer. But how long was a minute or a minute and a half? With his heart thudding in his chest, every breath a desperate gasp, Enos had no sure grasp.

Tom Sturtevant pointed, as Enos had when he spotted the periscope. “There it goes, the goddamn son of a bitch!” Sturtevant shouted. Sure enough, the pale wake of the torpedo stretched out across the blue, blue water of the tropical Atlantic. Sturtevant stepped over to George beside his one-pounder and slapped him on the back hard enough to stagger him. “If you hadn’t spotted the ’scope, the bastard would’ve been able to sneak in closer for a better shot. You made him fire it off too quick.”

“Good.” Enos patted the magazine of nicely heavy shells he’d loaded into the one-pounder. He remembered what they’d done to the conning tower of the Snook, and to a couple of Confederate sailors who’d got in the way of them. “Now we’ve got the ball.”

“Yeah,” Sturtevant said as the Ericsson slowed not far from the point whence the torpedo had been launched. “Now we start dropping ash cans on his head, and see if we can put him out of business for good.”

At the side of the depth-charge launcher, Lieutenant Crowder said, “Let’s give him a couple, shall we, Mr. Sturtevant? Set them for a hundred and fifty feet.”

“A hundred and fifty feet. Aye aye, sir,” the petty officer answered. He commanded the rest of the men at the launcher with effortless authority. A depth charge flew through the air and splashed into the Atlantic. A moment later, another followed.

Somewhere down under the ocean, a boatful of men who’d just done their best to sink the Ericsson were listening to those splashes. George felt a weird sympathy for the submersible’s crew. The only thing a submersible had going for it was stealth. It couldn’t fight on the surface against a warship. It couldn’t outrun a warship, either. All it could do was sneak close, try for a kill, and then try to sneak away if that didn’t work.

Sympathy had nothing whatever to do with whether George hoped the submariners would be able to sneak away after trying to kill him (and, in his own mind incidentally, everyone else on the Ericsson). He didn’t. “Come on, you bastards,” he said while the depth charges sank. “Come on.”

Fifty yards below the surface of the Atlantic, the depth charges went off, one after the other, a few feet apart. Water on the surface bubbled and boiled. After the explosions, though, nothing more happened: no rush of air bubbles proclaiming a ruptured pressure hull, no oil slick telling of other damage, no boat hastily surfacing before it sank forever.

Turning, the Ericsson moved slowly to the southeast. “Hydrophone bearing,” a sailor called back to Lieutenant Crowder. The underwater listening device had two drawbacks. Where along that bearing the submersible lay was anybody’s guess. Also, when the destroyer’s engines were running, they drowned out most of the noise the submarine was making.

Nevertheless, after a couple of minutes, a messenger hurried back to Crowder from the bridge. The young lieutenant listened, nodded, and spoke to Carl Sturtevant. “Two more depth charges. Set the fuses for a hundred feet.”

“A hundred feet. Aye aye, sir,” Sturtevant said. Off flew the charges, two bangs in quick succession. The wait, this time, wasn’t so long. The Atlantic bubbled and boiled again. No evidence that the charges had done any good appeared.

“Is the launcher in proper working order?” Crowder demanded. It had damaged a submersible the last time they used it. Enos thought along with the officer. If it didn’t force a boat to the surface this time, something surely had to be wrong with it…unless the skipper down below was laughing up his sleeve, which struck George as a hell of a lot likelier.

“Yes, sir.” Carl Sturtevant gave the distinct impression that he’d talked with a hell of a lot of young officers in his day. No doubt the reason he gave that impression was that he had. He went on, “It’s working fine, sir. It’s just that there’s a hell of a lot of ocean out there, and the ash cans can’t tear up but a little bit of it at a time.”

“We got good results-damnation, we got outstanding results-the last time we used it,” Crowder said fretfully.

“Yes, sir, but life ain’t like a Roebuck’s catalogue, sir,” Sturtevant answered. “It don’t come with no money-back guarantee.”

That was good sense. As a fisherman, Enos knew exactly how good it was. Lieutenant Crowder pouted, for all the world like George, Jr. “Something must be wrong with the launcher,” he said, confirming George’s guess.

Sturtevant sent another pair of depth charges flying into the ocean, and another, and another. And, after that last pair, a thick stream of bubbles rose to the surface, as did a considerable quantity of thick black oil that spread over the blue, blue water of the Atlantic. “That’s a hurt boat down there, sir,” Carl Sturtevant breathed. “Hurt, or else playing games with us.” He turned to the launcher crew. “Now we hammer the son of a bitch.” Ash can after ash can splashed into the water.

More air bubbles rose. So did more oil. The boat from which they rose, however, remained submerged. “I wonder how deep the water is down there,” Crowder said musingly. “If we’ve sunk that submersible, we’re liable to never, ever know it.”

“That’s so, sir,” Sturtevant agreed. “But if we think we’ve sunk him and we’re wrong, we’ll find out like a kick in the balls.” George Enos nodded. A fisherman who wasn’t a born pessimist hadn’t been going to sea long enough.

The Ericsson held her position till sundown, lobbing occasional depth charges into the sea. “We’ll report this one as a probable sinking,” Lieutenant Crowder said. No one argued with him. No one could argue with him. He was the officer.

Commander Roger Kimball’s head pounded and ached as if with a hangover, and he hadn’t even had the fun of getting drunk. The air inside the Bonefish was foul, and getting fouler. In the dim orange glow of the electric lamps, he struck a match. It burned with a fitful blue flame for a few seconds, then went out, adding a sulfurous stink to the astonishing cacophony of stenches already inside the pressure hull.

He checked his watch: two in the morning, a few minutes past. Quietly, he asked, “How much longer can we stay submerged?”

“Three or four hours left in the batteries, sir, provided we don’t have to gun the engine,” Tom Brearley answered, also quietly, after checking the dials. He inhaled, then grimaced. “Air won’t stay good that long, though, I’m afraid.”

“And I’m afraid you’re right.” Kimball shifted his feet, which set up a faint splashing. The pounding the boat had taken had started some new leaks, none of them, fortunately, too severe. “Damnyankee destroyer was throwing around depth charges like they were growin’ their own crop on deck.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said. The exec looked up toward the surface. “Next interesting question is-”

“Have they stalked us?” Kimball finished for him. “I’m hoping they think they sank us. We gave ’em enough clues before we slunk away. Only way we could have been more convincing would have been to shoot a couple of dead bodies out the forward tubes, and since we didn’t have any handy-”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said, and a couple of sailors nodded. “But if they’re anywhere close when we surface, we’re done for.”

“That’s a fact,” Kimball agreed. “But it’s also a fact that we’re done for if we don’t surface pretty damn soon.” He came to a sudden, abrupt decision. “We’ll bring her up to periscope depth and have a look around.”

Even that was risky; if the U.S. destroyer waited close by, bubbles on the surface might betray the Bonefish. The submersible rose sluggishly. Kimball had expended a lot of compressed air in feigning her untimely demise. When the periscope went up, he peered through it himself, not trusting anyone else with the job. Slowly, carefully, he went through a complete circuit of the horizon.

Nothing. No angular ship silhouette far off against the sky-nor menacingly close, either. No plume of smoke warning of a ship not very distant. Kimball went through the circuit again, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

Still nothing. “All hands prepare to surface,” he said, adding a moment later, “Bring her up, Mr. Brearley. We’ll get fresh air into the boat, we’ll fire up the diesels and cruise for a while to recharge the batteries-”

“We’ll flush the heads,” Ben Coulter said. Everyone in earshot fervently agreed with the petty officer as to the desirability of that. The pigs on the Arkansas farm where Kimball had grown up wouldn’t have lived in a sty that smelled half as bad as the Bonefish.

After the boat had surfaced, Kimball climbed up to the top of the conning tower to undog the hatch. Ben Coulter climbed up behind him to grab him around the shins and keep him from being blown out the hatch when it was undogged: the air inside the hull was under considerably higher pressure than that on the outside, and had a way of escaping with great vigor.

Out streamed the stinking air, like the spout of a whale. Somehow the stench was worse when mingled with the first fresh, pure breezes from outside. When altogether immersed in it, the nose, mercifully, grew numb. After the first taste of good air, though, the bad got worse.

Still, a few lungfuls of outside air went a long way toward clearing Kimball’s fuzzy wits. His headache vanished. From below came exclamations of delight and exclamations of disgust as fresh air began mingling with the nasty stuff inside the Bonefish.

The diesels rumbled to life. “All ahead half,” Kimball called down; Tom Brearley relayed the command to the engine crew. The wake the Bonefish kicked up glowed with a faint, pearly phosphorescence.

Brearley mounted to the top of the conning tower. He looked around and let out a long sigh that was as much a lung-clearer as a sound of relief. “We got away from them, sir,” he said.

“I didn’t want to get away from them,” Roger Kimball growled. “I wanted to sink the Yankee bastards. I would have done it, too, but they must have spotted the periscope. Soon as I saw ’em pick up speed and start that turn, I launched the fish, but the range was still long, and it missed.”

“We’re still in business,” Brearley said.

“We’re in the business of sending U.S. ships to the bottom,” Kimball answered. “We didn’t do it. Now that destroyer’s either going to go on south and try to strangle the British lifeline to South America, or else he’ll hang around here and try to keep us from going after his pals. Either way, he wouldn’t be doing it if we’d sent him to the bottom like we were supposed to.”

Kimball kept on fuming. His exec didn’t say anything more. The darkness hid Kimball’s smile, which was not altogether pleasant. He knew he alarmed Tom Brearley. It didn’t bother him. If he didn’t alarm the Tom Brearleys of the world, he wasn’t doing his job right.

When the sun rose, he halted the boat and allowed the men to come up and bathe in the warm water of the Atlantic, with lines tied round the middles of those who couldn’t swim. They put on their old, filthy uniforms again afterwards, but still enjoyed getting off some of the grime.

And then the Bonefish went hunting. Kimball had got used to patrolling inside a cage whose bars were lines of latitude and longitude. He supposed a lion would have found cage life tolerable if the keepers introduced a steady stream of bullocks on which it could leap.

Trouble was, he wasn’t a lion. Battleships were lions. He was a snake in the grass. He could kill bullocks-freighters. He could kill lions, too. He’d done it, even in their very lair. But if they saw him slithering along before he got close enough to bite, they could kill him, too, and easily. They could also kill him if he struck and missed, as he had at that nasty hunting dog of a destroyer.

So much of patrol duty was endlessly, mind-numbingly boring. More often than not, Kimball chafed under such boredom. Today, for once, he welcomed it. It gave the crew a chance to recover from the long, tense time they’d spent submerged. It gave the diesels a chance to recharge the batteries in full. If that damned destroyer had stumbled across the boat too soon, she couldn’t have gone underwater for long or traveled very far. A submarine that had to try to slug it out on the surface was a dead duck.

A quiet evening followed the quiet day. The crew needed to recharge their batteries, too. A lot of them spent a lot of time in their hammocks or wrapped in the blankets they spread next to or, more often, on top of equipment. The odor of fried fish jockeyed for position among all the other smells inside the pressure hull-Ben Coulter had caught a tuna that had almost ended up dragging him into the Atlantic instead of his being able to pull it out.

“You know what?” Kimball asked his exec. They’d both had big tuna steaks. Kimball wished for a toothpick; he had a shred of fish stuck between a couple of back teeth, and couldn’t work it loose with his tongue.

“What’s that, sir?” Tom Brearley asked.

“You know the Japs?” Kimball said. “You know what they do? They eat tuna raw sometimes. Either they dip it in horseradish or bean juice or sometimes both of ’em together, or else they just eat it plain. Don’t that beat hell?”

“You’re making that up,” Brearley said. “You’ve told me enough tall tales to stretch from the bottom of the ocean up to here. I’ll be damned if you’ll catch me again.”

“Solemn fact,” Kimball said, and raised his hand as if taking oath. His exec still wouldn’t believe him. They both started to get angry, Kimball because he couldn’t convince Brearley, the exec because he thought the skipper kept pulling his leg harder and harder. At last, disgusted, Kimball growled, “Oh, the hell with it,” and stomped back down to the solitary albeit cramped splendor of his bunk.

He and Brearley were wary with each other the next morning, too, both of them speaking with military formality usually ignored aboard submersibles in every navy in the world. Then the lookout let out a holler-“Smoke off to the east!”-and they forgot about the argument.

Kimball hurried up to the top of the conning tower. The lookout pointed. Sure enough, not just one trail but several smudged the horizon. Kimball smiled a predatory smile. “Either those are freighters, or else they’re warships loafing along without the least little idea we’re anywhere around. Any which way, we’re going to have some fun.” He called down the hatch: “Give me twelve knots, and change course to 135. Let’s get in front of the bastards and take a look at what we’ve got.”

The Bonefish swung through the turn. Kimball peered through his binoculars. “What are we after?” Brearley asked from below.

“Looks like supply ships,” Kimball answered. “Can’t be sure they haven’t got one of those disguised auxiliary cruisers sneaking along with ’em, though. Well, I don’t give a damn if they do. We’ve still got plenty of fish on board, and I’m not talking about that damned tuna.”

Skippers who paid attention to nothing but what was right in front of their noses did not live to grow old. While Kimball guided the Bonefish toward her prey, he kept another lookout up on the conning tower with him to sweep the rest of the horizon.

He jumped when the sailor tapped him on the shoulder. Apologetically, the fellow said, “I hate to tell you, sir, but there’s smoke over on the western horizon, and whatever’s making it looks to be heading this way in a hell of a hurry.”

“Thanks, Caleb.” Kimball turned, hoping the sailor was somehow mistaken. But he wasn’t. Whatever was making that smoke was heading in the general direction of the Bonefish, and heading toward her faster than anything had any business traveling on the ocean. He raised the binoculars to his eyes. Almost as he watched, the ship crawled over the horizon. He counted stacks-one, two, three…four. Cursing, he said, “Go below, Caleb,” and then bawled down the hatch: “All hands prepare to dive! Take her down to periscope depth.”

The Bonefish had no trouble escaping the U.S. destroyer. Depth charges roared, but far in the distance. Tom Brearley said, “We spotted her in good time.”

“That’s not the point, goddammit,” Kimball growled. “The point is, she made us break off the attack on those other Yankee ships. They’ll get away clean while we’re crawling along down here. She did what she was supposed to do, and she kept us from doing what we’re supposed to do. Nobody does that to me.” His voice sounded the more menacing for being flat and quiet. “Nobody does that to me, do you hear? I hope that destroyer hangs around this part of the ocean, ’cause if she does, I’ll sink her.”

Sylvia Enos felt like a billiard ball, caroming from one cushion to the next. She got off the trolley not by her house, but by the school a couple of stops away. After Brigid Coneval’s husband stopped a bullet with his chest, Sylvia had had to enroll George, Jr., in kindergarten. He was enjoying himself there. That wasn’t the problem. Neither was his staying on the school grounds till she got out of work. A lot of boys and girls did that. The school had a banner out front: WE STAY OPEN TO SUPPORT THE WAR EFFORT.

The problem was…“Come on, George,” Sylvia said, tugging at his hand. “We’ve still got to pick up your sister.”

George didn’t want to go. “Benny hit me a while ago, and I haven’t hit him back yet. I’ve got to, Mama.”

“Do it tomorrow,” Sylvia said. George, Jr., tried to twist free. She whacked him on the bottom, which got enough of his attention to let her drag him out of the schoolroom and back toward the trolley stop.

They missed the trolley anyhow-it clattered away just as they hurried up. Sylvia whacked George, Jr., again. That might have made him feel sorry. Then again, it might not have. It did make Sylvia feel better. Twilight turned into darkness. Mosquitoes began to buzz. Sylvia sighed. Spring was here at last. She slapped, too late.

Fifteen minutes after they missed the trolley, the next car on the route came by. Sylvia threw two nickels in the fare box and rode back in the other direction, to the apartment of the new woman she’d found to watch Mary Jane. “I’m sorry I’m late, Mrs. Dooley,” she said.

Rose Dooley was a large woman with a large, square jaw that might have made her formidable in the prize ring. “Try not to be late again, Mrs. Enos, if you please,” she said, but then softened enough to admit, “Your daughter wasn’t any trouble today.”

“I’m glad,” Sylvia said. “I am sorry.” Blaming George, Jr., wouldn’t have done any good. She took Mary Jane’s hand. “Let’s go home.”

“I’m hungry, Mama,” Mary Jane said.

“So am I,” George, Jr., agreed.

By the time they got back to the apartment building, it was after seven. By then, the children weren’t just saying they were hungry. They were shouting it, over and over. “If you hadn’t dawdled on your way to the trolley, we’ve have been home a while ago, and you would be eating by now,” Sylvia told George, Jr. That got Mary Jane mad at her big brother, but didn’t stop either of the children from complaining.

They both complained some more when Sylvia paused to see if any mail had come. “Mama, we’re starving,” George, Jr., boomed. Mary Jane added shrill agreement.

“Hush, both of you.” Sylvia held up an envelope, feeling vindicated. “Here is a letter from your father. You wouldn’t have wanted it to wait, would you?”

That did quiet them, at least until they actually got inside the flat. George Enos had assumed mythic proportions to both of them, especially to Mary Jane, who hardly remembered him at all. One corner of Sylvia’s mouth turned down. She wished her husband had mythic proportions in her eyes.

“If you read it to us, Mama, will you make supper right afterwards?” Mary Jane asked. Her brother’s bluster hadn’t worked; maybe bargaining would.

And it did. “I’ll even start the fire in the stove now, so it will be getting hot while I’m reading the letter,” Sylvia said. Her children clapped their hands.

She fed coal into the firebox with care; people at the canning plant said the Coal Board was going to cut the ration yet again, apparently intent on making people eat their food raw for the rest of the war. Glancing in the coal bin, she thought she probably had enough to keep cooking till the end of the month.

As soon as she walked back into the front room from the cramped kitchen, George, Jr., and Mary Jane jumped on her like a couple of football tackles. “Read the letter!” they chanted. “Read the letter!” Some of that was eagerness to hear from their father, more was likely to be eagerness to get her cooking.

She opened the envelope with a strange mixture of happiness and dread. If George had come into port to mail the letter, who could guess what he was doing besides mailing it? As a matter of fact, she could guess perfectly well. The trouble was, she couldn’t know.

When she saw a scrawled line at the top of the page, she let out a silent sigh of relief. A supply ship bound for home came alongside just after I finished this, George had written, so it will get to you soon. That meant he hadn’t set foot on dry land. She could relax, at least for a while.

“ ‘Dear Sylvia,’ ” Sylvia read aloud, “ ‘and little George who is getting big and Mary Jane too-’ ”

“I’m getting big!” Mary Jane said.

“I know you are, and so does your father,” Sylvia said. “Shall I go on?” The children nodded, so she did: “ ‘I am fine. I hope you are fine. We are down here in the-’ ”

“Why did you stop, Mama?” George, Jr., asked.

“There’s a word that’s all scratched out, so I can’t read it,” Sylvia answered. Censors, she thought. As if I’m going to tell anybody where George’s ship is. She resumed: “ ‘We are doing everything we can to whip our enemies. A sub tried to torpedo us, but we got away with no trouble at all.’ ”

“Wow!” George, Jr., said.

Sylvia wondered how much more dangerous that had been than George was making it out to be in his letter. Like any fisherman, he was in the habit of minimizing mishaps, to keep his loved ones from worrying. “ ‘We went after him and we’-oh, here are more words scratched out,” she said. “ ‘They say we either damaged him or sunk him, and I hope they are right.’ ”

“What does damaged mean?” Mary Jane asked.

“Hurt,” Sylvia answered. “ ‘I have chipped more paint than I ever thought there was in the whole wide world. The chow is not half so good as yours or what Charlie White used to make on the Ripple but there is plenty of it. Tell little George and Mary Jane to be good for me. I hope I see them and you real soon. I love you all and I miss you. George.’ ”

She set the letter on the table in front of the sofa. “Now make supper!” George, Jr., and Mary Jane yelled together.

“I’ve got some scrod, and I’ll fry potatoes with it,” Sylvia said. Even though George was in the Navy, she still had connections among the dealers and fishermen down on T Wharf. The transactions were informal enough that none of the many and various rationing boards knew anything about them. As long as she was content to eat fish-and she would have been a poor excuse for a fisherman’s wife if she weren’t-she and her family ate pretty well.

Fisherman’s children, George, Jr., and Mary Jane ate up the tender young cod as readily as Sylvia did. And they plowed through mountains of potatoes fried in lard and salted with a heavy hand. Sylvia wished she could have given them more milk than half a glass apiece, but she didn’t know anybody who had anything to do with milk rationing.

After she washed the supper dishes, she filled a big pitcher from the stove’s hot-water reservoir and marched the children down to the end of the hall for their weekly bath. They went with all the delight of Rebel prisoners marching off into captivity in the United States.

They were as obstreperous as Rebel prisoners, too; by the time she had them clean, they had her wet. In dudgeon approaching high, she marched them back to the apartment and changed into a quilted housecoat. They played for a while-Mary Jane was alternately an adjunct and a hindrance to George, Jr.’s, game, which involved storming endless ranks of Confederate trenches. When he pretended to machine-gun her and made her cry, Sylvia called a halt to the proceedings.

She read to them from Hiawatha and put them to bed. But then, it was nearly nine o’clock. She’d have to get up before six to get George, Jr., off to kindergarten and Mary Jane to Mrs. Dooley’s. Silently, she cursed Brigid Coneval’s husband for getting shot. If he’d had any idea how much trouble his death was causing her, he never would have been so inconvenient.

Twenty minutes-maybe even half an hour-to herself, with no one to tell her what to do, seemed the height of luxury. Had George been here, she knew what he would have wanted to do with that time. And she would have gone along. Not only was it her wifely duty, he pleased her most of the time-or he had.

After a long day at the canning plant, after a long day made longer by missing the trolley when she was trying to retrieve Mary Jane, wifely duty didn’t have a whole lot of meaning left to it. If she felt like making love, she would make love. If she didn’t…

“I’ll damn well go to bed, that’s what,” she said, and yawned. “And if George doesn’t like it-”

If George didn’t like it, he’d go out and find himself some strumpet. And then, one day, he’d drink too much, and he’d let her know. And then-

“Then I’ll throw him out on his two-timing ear,” she muttered, and yawned again. If she didn’t intend to fall asleep on the sofa, which she’d done a couple of times, she needed to get ready for bed.

She made sure she wound and set the alarm clock. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t wake up on time, not tired as she was. She put on her nightgown, went and brushed her teeth at the sink by the toilet, and then walked into the bedroom, turned off the lamp, and lay down.

Despite weariness, sleep did not want to come. Sylvia worried about what would happen on the sea, and about how much George hadn’t told her. She worried about what would happen if he didn’t come home. And, almost equally, she worried about what would happen when he did come home. He would expect things to be the same as they had been before he went into the Navy and she went to work, and she didn’t see how that was possible. She saw trouble ahead, with no more effort than she needed to see snow ahead in a boiling gray sky in February.

She writhed and stretched and wiggled and, at long last, went to sleep. When the alarm clock exploded into life beside her head, she had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Only after that did she recover enough to turn off the clock.

“Oh, God,” she groaned, “another day.” She got out of bed.

Lucien Galtier stared at the envelope in some perplexity. It bore no postage stamp, not even one of the peculiar sort the United States had prepared for occupied Quebec. Where the stamp should have been was a printed phrase in both English and French: UNDER THE PERMIT OF THE U.S. OCCUPYING AUTHORITY. PENALTY FOR UNAUTHORIZED USE, $300.

Marie had not opened the envelope. Instead, she’d sent Denise to get Charles, and Charles to bring Lucien to the farmhouse from the fields. “What sort of trouble are you in?” his wife demanded, glaring from the envelope to Lucien and back again as if unable to decide which of them she despised more.

“In the name of God, I do not know,” he answered. “I have done nothing to make the occupying authorities dislike me, not for some time.”

“Then why do they send this to you?” Marie said, confident he had no answer, as indeed he had none. Having reduced him to silence, she snapped, “Well, why do you hesitate? Open it, that we may see what sort of injustice they aim to inflict on us now.”

“This I will do,” Galtier replied. “Once I open it, at least I will know what the trouble is, and no longer be plagued by wild guesses.” Marie ignored that, as beneath her dignity. When Charles, who had accompanied his father, presumed to smile, she froze the expression on his face with a glance.

Muttering under his breath, Galtier tore the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of paper, again printed in both English and French. Marie snatched it out of his hands and read it aloud: “ ‘All citizens of this occupation district are cordially invited to gather in the market square of Riviere-du-Loup at two in the afternoon on Sunday, the fifteenth of April, 1917, to hear an important announcement and proclamation. Attendance at this festivity is not required, but will surely prove of interest.’ ”

“There! Do you see? I am not in difficulty with the authorities for any reason whatsoever,” Lucien said triumphantly. “It is not a letter to me or even about me. It is a general circular, like a patent-medicine flyer.”

Marie took no notice of his tone. She’d had more than twenty years’ practice taking no notice of his tone when that suited her purposes, as it did now. She said, “For what reason do they send this out? They have never done anything like it before.” She regarded the paper with deep suspicion.

Charles nodded vigorously. “They cordially invite us,” he said. “They call this a festivity. They say we do not have to come to it. They have never done anything like this since they overran our country.” Galtier’s elder son was probably the quietest member of the family, and also the least reconciled to the U.S. occupation.

“It could be,” Lucien said, “that Nicole will know more of this, working as she does at the hospital with so many Americans. For now, and until she comes home, I do not intend to worry about it, as I have plenty to do in the fields if we are to put in any sort of crop this year.”

“Yes, go on, get out of the house,” Marie said. “I also have plenty to do.”

“And who called me to the house?” he asked, but he might as well have been talking to the air.

Even as he worked, though, he wondered about the peculiar announcement from the U.S. occupiers. It was the most nearly civil thing they had done in the nearly three years since they’d invaded Quebec. Up till now, civility had not been their long suit. He wondered why they were changing course. Like Marie, like most Quebecois, he was suspicious of change, as likely being for the worse.

Despite that suspicion of change, he would have been glad if Nicole had brought Dr. O’Doull home for supper. But she returned to the farmhouse by herself, and proved to be as startled by the flyer as the rest of the family.

“How are we to find out what it means?” she asked.

Georges spoke up, as innocent-sounding and sarcastic as usual: “It could be-and I know it is only a foolish notion of mine-we might even stay in town after we go to Mass, and hear this announcement and proclamation for ourselves.”

His older sister glared at him. He beamed back, mild as milk, which only made her more furious. Before the row could go any further, Lucien said, “That is exactly what we shall do.” Marie gave him a look that was anything but altogether approving. Once he had made his intention so plain, though, not even she saw any chance of getting him to change his mind.

The highway up to Riviere-du-Loup was more crowded than usual that Sunday morning, as many families from the outlying farms came in to the town to go to church and then stay. The big, snorting U.S. trucks always on the road had to use their horns again and again to clear the slow-moving wagons from their path. Many of the men in the wagons took their own sweet time about getting out of the way, too.

Splendid in his new vestments, Bishop Pascal officiated at the Mass. “Please stay for the afternoon’s announcements,” he urged his flock. “You will find it of interest, I assure you.” He said no more than that, which both surprised Lucien and set him scratching his head. The Pascal he knew could hardly open his mouth without falling in. It was another change to mistrust.

When Galtier emerged from the church with his family, he found one more change: the market square had been draped with bunting, some red, white, and blue, some simply white and blue, the colors of Quebec. “What are they going to say?” he asked the air. “What are they going to do? Are they going to say we are now a part of the United States? If they say this, I say to them that we shall be a troubled part of the United States.”

“We are here,” Marie said. “Let us wait. Let us see. What else can we do?” There, Lucien found nothing with which to disagree.

They waited, and chatted with neighbors and with folk who did not live close by the farm and whom they saw but seldom. At precisely two o’clock, Major Jedediah Quigley and Bishop Pascal ascended to a bunting-draped platform a squad of U.S. soldiers had set up not far from the church.

An expectant hush fell. Into it, Major Quigley spoke in his elegant-his too-elegant-French: “My friends, I should like to thank all of you for coming here today and becoming a part of this great day in the history of your land. As others are announcing elsewhere at this very same moment, the government of the United States from this time forth recognizes the sovereignty and independence of the Republic of Quebec.”

“The what?” Lucien frowned. “There is no such thing.”

“There is now,” someone behind him said. He nodded. He did not know what to feel: joy, fury, bewilderment? Bewilderment won. Quebecois were a separate people, yes, assuredly. Were they a separate nation? If they were, what sort of separate nation would they be?

Quigley was continuing: “I am pleased to announce that the sovereign and independent Republic of Quebec has already been accorded diplomatic recognition as a nation among the nations of the world by the German Empire, the Empire of Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Kingdom of Poland, the Republic of Chile, the Republic of Paraguay, the government of the Republic of Liberia, and the government-in-exile of the Republic of Haiti in Philadelphia. Many other governments, I am certain, will soon recognize your new and thriving nation. From this, citizens of the Republic of Quebec, you can see that your well-deserved independence from the British creation of Canada is popular throughout the world.”

From this, Lucien thought, we can see that the United States and their allies recognize this so-called Republic, and that no one else does. That left him anything but surprised: the Entente powers would hardly acknowledge that one of their own would be, could be, torn asunder. The Entente powers did not recognize the Poland the Germans had erected on soil taken from Russia, either.

As if on cue-afterwards, but only afterwards, Galtier wondered if it was on cue-a soldier came running up to the platform waving a pale yellow telegram. Quigley took it, read it, and stared out at the buzzing crowd. A wide smile spread across his narrow face. He waved the telegram, too. “My friends!” he cried, his voice choked with emotion either genuine or artfully portrayed. “My friends, word has just reached me that the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of the Netherlands have also recognized the Republic of Quebec.”

That made the buzzing even louder, and changed its note. Lucien did not buzz, but he did raise an eyebrow. Italy was a member of the Quadruple Alliance with the USA, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, but a backsliding member: she had been neutral since the war began. And the Netherlands, though bordered on her entire land frontier by Germany and German-occupied Belgium, still carried on what trade with England she could. She was a true neutral, and she had recognized this republic.

“I am greatly honored to congratulate Quebec on achieving her independence, even if it was far too many years delayed by British contempt,” Major Quigley said, “and I am privileged to offer this salute to you, Quebecois free at last: vive la Republique de Quebec!”

“Vive la Republique!” Not everyone in the square shouted it. Not even a majority of the people in the square shouted it. But a surprising number-surprising, at any rate, to Lucien, who kept silent with his family-did shout it. Everyone looked around to see who shouted and who did not. Would feuds start because some had shouted and some had not?

Jedediah Quigley stepped back and Bishop Pascal stepped forward. “Vive la Republique de Quebec!” he echoed, not inviting anyone else to shout the phrase but making clear where he himself stood. “I say to you, it is long past time that we should be free, free from the indignities the British have heaped on us for so long. How many of you men, when you were conscripted into the Army of the Canada that was, and when you tried to speak your beautiful French language, were told by some ugly English sergeant, ‘Talk white!’?”

He dropped into English for those two words, which doubled their effect. Galtier chuckled uncomfortably. He’d heard sergeants say that, plenty of times. He was not the only man chuckling uncomfortably, either-far from it. Bishop Pascal knew how to flick where it was already raw.

He continued, “How many times have we had our sacred faith mocked by the Protestants in Ottawa, men who would not know piety and holiness if they came knocking on their doors? How many times must we be shown we are not and cannot be the equals of the English before we decide we have had a sufficiency? Soon, I pray, the Republic of Quebec will embrace all the Quebecois of la belle province de Quebec. Until that time comes, though, which God hasten, we have begun. Go with God, my friends, and pray with me for the success of la Republique de Quebec. Go in peace,” he finished, as he had finished the Mass not long before.

“What do we do now, Father?” It was Georges who asked the question, his voice and his expression both unwontedly serious.

“I do not know,” Lucien answered, and he could hear that he was far from the only man saying Je ne sais pas in the square at that moment. Slowly, he went on, “It is plain to see that this Republic, so-called, is to be nothing but a creature of the United States. But we were not altogether our own men in Canada, either. So I do not know. We shall have to see what passes.”

“It is too soon to tell what this all means.” Where Lucien had groped for words, Marie spoke with great finality. They both said the same thing, though. In the end, they usually did. Seeing as much, their children for once forbore to argue.

“Remembrance Day soon,” Captain Jonathan Moss remarked to Lieutenant Percy Stone as the two fliers rode battered bicycles along a dirt road not far from the aerodrome near Arthur, Ontario. Both men wore.45s on their hips; trouble wasn’t likely hereabouts, but it wasn’t impossible, either. Ontario remained resentful about occupation.

“It’ll be a good one,” Stone answered. His breath still steamed when he spoke, though spring, by the calendar, was almost a month old. It didn’t steam too much, though; it wasn’t the great cloud of frost it would have been at the equinox. Here and there, a few green blades of grass were poking up through the mud, though snow might yet put paid to them.

“A good one? It’ll be the best one ever,” Moss said. “Everything we’ve remembered for so long, we’re finally paying back.”

But Stone shook his head. “The best Remembrance Day ever will be the one after the war is over and we’ve whipped the Rebs and the Canucks and the limeys. Everything till then is just a buildup.”

Moss considered, then nodded. “All right, Percy. You’ve got me there.”

Stone looked around. “This road could use some building up. Come to that, this whole countryside could use some building up.”

“Well, you’re right about that, too,” Moss said. “Of course, you could say the same thing about just about any piece of Ontario we’re sitting on. If we haven’t ironed it flat to use it for something in particular, it’s had the living bejesus shot out of it.”

As if to prove his point, he had to swerve sharply to keep from steering his bicycle into a shell hole that scarred the road as smallpox scarred the face. And, as smallpox could scar more than the face, shell holes and bomb craters scarred more than the road; they dotted the whole landscape.

By what had to be a miracle, a twenty-foot stretch of wooden fence still stood next to the road not much farther on. Moss dug his heels into the dirt to stop his bicycle. He studied the fence with astonished fascination. “How many bullet holes do you suppose that timber’s got in it, Percy?” he asked.

“More than I feel like counting, I’ll tell you that,” Stone answered at once. “We should have brought Hans along. He’d count ’em, and tell you how many were our.30 caliber and how many the.303 the limeys and Canucks were shooting back at us.”

“You only think you’re joking,” Moss said. His friend shook his head. He wasn’t joking, and they both knew it. Hans Oppenheim would do the counting, and was liable to try to figure out how many men on each side were firing captured weapons, too.

Then Jonathan Moss stopped worrying about bullet holes and, for that matter, about Hans Oppenheim, too. Moving slowly across a battered field by the side of the road was a fair-haired woman of about his own age. She led a couple of scrawny cows toward a little creek that meandered through the field.

Percy Stone was also eyeing the young woman. He and Moss stopped their bicycles at the same time, as if they had turned their aeroplanes together up above the trench line. “You’re a married man,” Moss murmured to Stone.

“I know that,” his flightmate answered. Then he raised his voice: “Miss! Oh, Miss!”

The woman’s head came up, like that of a deer when a hunter steps on a dry twig. She looked back toward the distant farmhouse from which she’d come, then toward the much closer Americans. Plainly, her every urge was to flee, but she didn’t quite dare. “What do you want?” she demanded, her voice, like her face, wild and wary and hunted.

And what will Percy say to that? Moss wondered. Something like, Will you take a couple of dollars for a roll in the hay? Moss didn’t think that approach would work. Moss didn’t think any approach would work, not with a woman who had trouble even holding still in their presence.

Percy Stone didn’t even smile at her. He said, “If you’d be so kind, could we buy some milk from you?”

“You’re a genius,” Moss breathed. Stone did smile then, one of his little, self-deprecating grins.

The young woman stared at the cows as if she’d never seen them before, as if they betrayed her merely by being there. Visibly gathering her courage, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t anything-not one single thing-that I’d sell to you Yanks.”

Moss and Stone looked at each other. That was the reaction the U.S. occupiers got from almost all the Canucks in Ontario. From everything Moss had heard, it wasn’t like that everywhere in Canada. If it had been, the USA never could have set up the Republic of Quebec farther east.

“We don’t mean you any harm, Miss,” he said, “but my friend is right. Some fresh milk would be good, and we’d gladly pay you for it.”

“If you don’t mean any harm,” the woman said, “why don’t you get out of my country, go back to yours, and leave us alone?” Her head came up in defiance; if she wasn’t going to run away from a couple of Yanks, she’d give them a piece of her mind instead.

“If you want to argue like that, why did England invade my country from Canada during the Second Mexican War?” Moss returned.

“Why did you Yanks try invading us during your Revolution, and again during the War of 1812?” she said. “You can’t blame us for not trusting you. You’ve never given us any reason to trust you, and you’ve given us plenty of reason not to.”

“Did we invade Canada back then?” Moss whispered to Stone.

Stone shrugged. “Don’t know. If we did, we didn’t win, so you can’t expect the history books to say much about it.”

Moss grunted. “In that case, the history books wouldn’t have much to say about anything that’s happened since the War of Secession.” But it wasn’t the same thing, and he knew it. Since the War of Secession, the USA had been put upon. Everybody knew that. If the United States had been trying to do the muscling in the earlier days and had got licked, too, that wasn’t just defeat. It was embarrassment, which was worse.

“You don’t even believe me,” the young woman jeered. “Your schools have filled you so full of lies, you don’t believe the truth when you hear it. If you want to know what I think, that’s pretty sad.”

“What makes you so sure you’re preaching the Gospel?” Moss said, getting angry in turn. “I never once heard of a Canuck who wouldn’t lie.”

He didn’t care about milk any more. He wanted to wound the young woman. To his surprise, she laughed. “How do I know I’m telling the truth? Because my maiden name is Laura Secord, that’s how. I’m named after my four-times-great aunt, who went through twenty miles of woods in the dark to let the British soldiers know you Yanks had invaded. And do you know what else? Laura Secord was born in Massachusetts. Up here, any school child knows about her.”

“Like Paul Revere,” Stone muttered, and Moss ruefully nodded.

“Maybe you won that time,” he said to Laura who had been born Secord, “but we’re here to stay now. You may as well learn to like it.”

“Go on your way, Yank,” she said, tossing her head. “You’ll be older than Methuselah before we learn to like it. And don’t be too sure you’re here to stay, either. We’re still in the fight.” The slight Scots burr that distinguished the Canadian accent from the American made her sound very determined indeed.

“Where is your husband?” Percy Stone demanded, his voice suddenly harsh, too.

“Where? Where do you think? In the Canadian Army, where he belongs,” the young woman answered. “I told you once-now I tell you again, go on your way.” She spoke with an odd authority, as if she owned the land and were entitled to give commands on it.

The breeze picked up her yellow hair, which hung uncurled and unconfined, and threw it out behind her like a flag. Her eyes, granite gray, blazed. If her husband was anywhere near as formidable as she, Moss thought, he’d be one dangerous Canuck with a rifle in his hands. Just for a moment, she put the flier in mind of a Viking, and made him wonder, only a little less than seriously, if she’d charge down on him and Stone.

She did take a step toward the two Americans. It was not a charge, though. Her face crumpled; tears ran down her cheeks. Her voice choked, she said, “Go on. Can you not have at least the simple human decency to let me be? Is that too much to ask?”

Without answering her, without looking at Percy Stone, Moss started riding again. A moment later, the former photographer from Ohio joined him. “Quite a lot of woman there,” Stone remarked after a bit.

Jonathan Moss nodded. “Quite a lot of lady there, too,” he said. “After a while, you forget the difference between the one and the other, till it up and stares you in the face.”

Stone nodded. “A woman like that-” He sighed. “She makes you wish she liked the USA better. If we could win over that kind of people, we’d win the war and the peace both.”

“I wonder what they do in Canada instead of Remembrance Day,” Moss said. “They’ve been on top so long, they don’t know what it’s like to be on the bottom. And”-he tried to forestall his friend-“I don’t give a damn about what the first Laura Secord did a hundred years ago.”

“Why not?” Stone said, not about to be forestalled. “If she hadn’t made it through those woods back then, maybe Canada would have been part of the USA the past hundred years, and we wouldn’t have to worry about beating the Canucks now.”

“If I’m going to play the game of might-have-beens, I’d sooner play it with the War of Secession, thanks. If we’d won that and kept the damn Rebs in the United States with us, maybe-”

“Fat chance,” Percy Stone said. “They had England and France on their side, and Lee and Jackson for generals. Jackson licked us again twenty years later, too. And what did we have? President Abraham Lincoln!” His lip curled contemptuously.

Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.