The Center Cannot Hold

II

Jake Featherston drummed his fingers on his desk. Spring was in the air in Richmond; the trees were putting on new leaves, while birdsong gladdened every ear. Or almost every ear-it did very little for Featherston. He'd led a battery of three-inch guns during the war, and much preferred their bellowing to the sweet notes of catbird and sparrow. When the guns roared, at least a man knew he was in a fight.

"And we are, God damn it," Featherston muttered. The leader of the Freedom Party was a lanky man in his mid-thirties, with cheekbones and chin thrusting up under the flesh of his face like rocks under a thin coat of soil on some farm that would always yield more trouble than crops. His eyes… Some people were drawn to them, while others flinched away. He knew that. He didn't quite understand it, but he knew it and used it. I always mean what I say, he told himself. And that shows. With all the lying sons of bitches running around loose, you'd better believe it shows.

If he looked out his window, he could see Capitol Square, and the Confederate Capitol in it. His lip curled in fine contempt. If that wasn't the home of some of the biggest, lyingest sons of bitches in the whole wide world… "If it isn't, then I'm a nigger," Featherston declared. He talked to himself a fair amount, hardly noticing he was doing it. More than three years of serving a gun had taken a good deal of his hearing. People who didn't care for him claimed he was selectively deaf. They had a point, too, though he wasn't about to admit it.

The Capitol shared the square with a large equestrian statue of George Washington-who, being a Virginian, was much more revered in the CSA than in the USA these days-and an even larger one of Albert Sidney Johnston, hero and martyr during the War of Secession. Somewhere between one of those statues and the other, Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA almost ten years before.

"We should've licked those Yankee bastards," Featherston said, as if somebody'd claimed otherwise. "If the niggers hadn't risen up and stabbed us in the back, we would've licked those Yankee bastards." He believed it with every fiber of his being.

And if that jackass down in Birmingham hadn't blown out President Hampton's stinking brains, what there were of them, the Party'd be well on its way towards putting this country back on its feet again. Jake slammed a scarred, callused fist down on the desk. Papers jumped. I was so close, dammit. He'd come within a whisker-well, two whiskers-of winning the presidential election in 1921. Looking toward 1927, he'd seen nothing but smooth sailing ahead.

Of course, one of the reasons the Freedom Party had almost won in 1921 was that its members went out there and brawled with anybody rash enough to have a different opinion. If you looked at things from one angle, President Hampton's assassination followed from the Freedom Party's nature almost as inexorably as night followed day.

Jake Featherston was not, had never been, and never would be a man to look at things that way.

He'd watched the Party lose seats in the 1923 Congressional elections. He'd been glad the losses weren't worse. Other people celebrated because they were as large as they were. Up till that damned unfortunate incident, the Freedom Party had gone from success to success, each building momentum for the next. Unfortunately, he was finding the process worked the same way for failure.

What do we do if the money doesn't keep coming in? What can we do if the money doesn't keep coming in? he wondered. Only one answer occurred to him. We go under, that's what. When he'd first joined the Freedom Party in the dark days right after the war, it had been nothing to speak of: a handful of angry men meeting in a saloon, with the membership list and everything else in a cigar box. It could end up that way again, too; he knew as much. Plenty of groups of disgruntled veterans had never got any bigger, and the Party had swallowed up a lot of the ones that had. Some other group could swallow it the same way.

"No, goddammit," Jake snarled. For one thing, he remained convinced he was right. If the rest of the world didn't think so, the rest of the world was wrong. And, for another, he'd got used to leading an important political party. He liked it. Without false modesty-and he was singularly free of modesty, false and otherwise-he knew he was good at it. He didn't want to play second fiddle to anybody else, and he didn't want to go back to being a big fish in a tiny pond.

The telephone on his desk jangled. He picked it up. "Featherston," he barked into the mouthpiece.

"Yes, Mr. Featherston," his secretary said. "I just wanted to remind you that you've got that talk on the wireless coming up in a little more than an hour. You'll want to make sure you're at the studio on time."

"Thank you kindly, Lulu," Featherston answered. He was more polite to Lulu Mattox than to practically anybody else he could think of. Unlike most people, his secretary deserved it. She was a maiden lady, somewhere between forty and seventy. Once upon a time, he'd read or heard-he couldn't remember where or when-that Roman Catholic nuns were the brides of Christ. What he really knew about Catholicism would fit on the head of a pin; he'd been raised a hardshell Baptist, and he didn't get to any church very often these days. But Lulu Mattox, without a doubt, was married to the Freedom Party. She gave it a single-minded devotion that put the enthusiasm of any mere Party man to shame. She had all the files at her fingertips, too, for she was the best-organized person Jake had ever met. He didn't know what he would do without her.

A few minutes later, he went downstairs. Guards outside the building came to attention and saluted. "Freedom!" they said. The uniforms they wore were similar but not quite identical to those of the Confederate Army. The bayoneted Tredegar rifles they carried were Army issue. Someone might have asked questions about that, but the Freedom Party had gone out of its way to show the world that asking questions about it wasn't a good idea.

"Freedom!" Jake echoed, returning those salutes as if he were a general himself. Part of him loathed the fat fools with the wreathed stars on their collar tabs who'd done so much to help the CSA lose the war. The rest of him wished he had that kind of power himself. I'd do a better job with it than those bastards ever could have.

A motorcar driven by another uniformed Freedom Party man stopped in front of the building. It was a boxy Birmingham, built in the CSA. Jake Featherston was damned if he'd go around Richmond in a Yankee automobile. "That wireless place," he told the driver.

"Sure, Sarge," the man replied. He was a large, burly fellow named Virgil Joyner. He'd been with the Freedom Party almost as long as Featherston had, and he'd been through all of the faction fights and the brawls with the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. Not many people could get away with calling Jake anything but "boss," but he'd earned the right.

The broadcasting studio was in a new brick building on Franklin near Seventh, not far from the house in Richmond where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived for a time after the War of Secession. Featherston knew that only because he'd grown up in and around Richmond. Nothing remained of the house these days; Yankee bombs and the fires that so often followed them had leveled it.

"Hello, Mr. Featherston!" exclaimed the bright little man who ran the studio and the wireless station of which it was a part. His name was Saul Goldman. Since he was a Jew, Featherston assumed he sounded so cheerful, so friendly, because he was getting paid. He was bound to be a Radical Liberal himself, if not an out-and-out Red. Long as we give 'em the money, these bastards'll sell us the rope we use to hang 'em, Featherston thought scornfully.

But if Goldman acted friendly, he'd play along-for now. "Good to see you," he said, and shook hands polite as a banker. "Everything ready for me?"

"Yes, sir. You're in Studio B this time. Follow me. You have your script?"

"Oh, yeah. You bet I do." Featherston followed Goldman down a narrow, dingy hall to a cramped little studio whose walls and ceiling were covered by what looked like the cardboard bottoms of egg cartons. The stuff looked funny, but it helped kill echoes. The studio held a table with a microphone on it and a rickety chair. That was all. Jake pointed to the engineer in the next room, whom he could see through a window. "He'll give me the signal when it's time?"

Saul Goldman smiled. "That's right. You know the routine almost like you work here."

"I'd better by now, don't you think?" Featherston sat down in front of the microphone and set his script on the table. He went through it quickly to make sure he had all the pages. Once he'd lost one, and had to ad-lib a bridge to the next one he had. Goldman slid out of the studio, closing the door behind him. The back of the door had more of those egg-carton sound deadeners glued to it.

After a bit, the engineer flashed two fingers-two minutes to go. Jake nodded to show he got it. The engineer was a professional, a man whose competence Jake respected. One finger-one minute. Then the fellow pointed straight at him at the same time as a red light went on. For half an hour, the airwaves were his.

"Confederates, wake up!" he said harshly. "This is Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, and I'm here to tell you the truth." He used that phrase to introduce every wireless talk.

He leaned toward the microphone, as he would have leaned toward a crowd. The first few times he'd done this, not having an audience in front of him had thrown him off stride. Now, though, he could imagine the crowd, hear it in his mind shouting for more. And he had more to give it.

"We can be a great country again," he said. "We can, but will we? Not likely, not with the cowards and idiots we've got running things in Richmond these days. All they want to do is lick the Yankees'… boots." You couldn't say some things on the air. No, you couldn't say them, but sometimes implication worked better anyhow.

"They want to lick the Yankees' boots," Jake repeated. "They're great ones for sucking up to people, the Whigs are. They even suck up to our Negroes, our own Negroes, if you can believe it. And do you know what, folks? They've got reason to do it, may I go to the Devil if I lie." He couldn't say hell on the air, either, but he got his message across. "I'll tell you what the reason is. Thanks to the Whigs, some of those niggers are citizens of the Confederate States, just like you and me.

"That's right, friends. This here was supposed to be a white man's country, but do the Whigs care about that? Not likely! Thanks to them, we've got niggers who can vote, niggers who can serve on juries, niggers who don't have to show passbooks to anybody. That'd be bad enough if they'd put the coons in the Army so we could win the war. But they put 'em in, and we lost anyways. And then the Whigs went out and won the next election even so. Maybe some of you all see the sense in that. I tell you frankly, I don't."

He went on till the engineer signaled it was time to wind down, and ended as the man drew a finger across his throat. When he walked out of the studio, his shirt was as sweaty as if he'd spoken before a crowd of thousands. Saul Goldman came up and shook his hand. "Very good speech," the Jew said. "Very good indeed."

"I will be damned," Featherston said. "I think you really mean it. You're not making fun of me." Goldman nodded. Jake asked the obvious question: "How come?"

"I'll tell you." Goldman had… not an accent, but the ghost of one, barely enough to suggest his parents would have spoken differently. "Anywhere else, when things go wrong, what do they do? They blame the Jews. Here, you blame the colored people. I am a Jew, a Jew in a country where things went wrong, and no one wants to kill me on account of it. Shouldn't I be grateful?"

Jake had never been much for seeing the other fellow's point of view, but he did this time. "Well, well," he said. "Isn't that interesting?"

P art of Colonel Irving Morrell-and the bigger part, at that-wanted to be back at Fort Leavenworth, making barrels larger and stronger and better. Part of him, but not all. The rest, the part that was a student of war rather than a combat soldier, found a lot to interest it back at the General Staff. Quite a few things crossed his desk that never made it into the newspapers.

He showed one of them to Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, asking, "Is this true?"

"Let me read through it first," Abell said. General Liggett's adjutant was thin and pale and almost sweatless, a pure student of war. Though probably brave enough, he would have been out of place on anything so untidy as a real battlefield. He and Morrell didn't much like each other, but over the years they'd developed a wary respect for each other's abilities. He took his own sweet time reading the report, then gave a judicious nod. "Yes, this ties in with some other things I've seen. I believe it's credible."

"The Turks really are massacring every Armenian they can get their hands on?" Morrell asked. Abell nodded again. Morrell took back the typewritten report, saying, "That's terrible! What can we do about it?"

"We, as in the United States?" Abell asked, precise as usual. Morrell gave him an impatient nod. He said, "As best I can see, Colonel, nothing. What influence can we bring to bear in that part of the world?"

Morrell grimaced and grunted. His colleague was all too likely to be right. He'd had to find Armenia on a map before fully understanding the report he'd received. How many Americans would even have known where to look? The distant land at the edge of the Caucasus might have been lost among the mountains of the moon, as far as most people were concerned. With the best will in the world, the Navy couldn't do a thing. And as for sending soldiers across a Russia whose civil strife looked eternal… The idea was absurd, and he knew it.

He tried a different tack: "Can Kaiser Bill do anything? When Germany spits, the Turks start swimming. And the Armenians are Christians, after all."

Lieutenant Colonel Abell started to say something, then let out his breath without a word. A moment later, after sending Morrell a thoughtful look, he said, "May I speak frankly, Colonel?"

"When have I ever stopped you?" Morrell asked in turn.

"A point," Abell admitted. "All right, then. There are times when you give the impression of being a man whose only solution to a problem is to hit something, and to keep hitting it till it falls over."

"Teddy Roosevelt spent a lot of time talking about the big stick, Lieutenant Colonel," Morrell said. "As far as I can see, he had a pretty good point."

John Abell looked distinctly pained. Sniffing, he said, "Our former president, however gifted, was not a General Staff officer, nor did he think like one. Which brings me back to what I was saying-you often give that same bull-moose impression, and then you turn around and come up with something not only clever but subtle. That might be worth pursuing. It would have to go through the State Department, of course."

Morrell grunted again. "And why should the boys in the cutaways and the striped trousers pay any attention to us green-gray types?"

For once, Abell's answering smile was sympathetic. The United States were one of the two most powerful countries in the world these days, sure enough. Very often, the American diplomatic corps behaved as if the U.S. Army had had nothing to do with that. Such a supercilious attitude infuriated Morrell. Of course, his fury mattered not at all; had people in the State Department known of it, it would more likely have amused them than anything else.

Abell said, "May I make a suggestion?"

"Please."

"If it were I," the brainy lieutenant colonel said, flaunting his grammatical accuracy, "I would draft a memorandum on the subject, send it to General Liggett, and hope he could get it to the secretary of war or one of his assistants. Being civilians, they have a better chance than we of getting the diplomats to notice the paper."

"That's… not bad, Lieutenant Colonel," Morrell said. Abell hadn't even tried to steal the idea for himself, and he had Liggett's ear. Though it wasn't obvious at first glance, he could be useful. Morrell chuckled. He probably thinks the same about me. He went on, "I'll take care of it right away. Thanks."

"Always glad to be of service, sir." Now Abell sounded as coolly ironic as usual.

When Morrell spoke that evening of what he'd done during the day, his wife nodded vigorous approval. "I hope something comes of it, Irv," Agnes Morrell said. "Hasn't this poor, sorry world seen enough killing these past few years?"

"Well, I think so," Morrell answered. "You won't find many soldiers singing the praises of murder, you know."

"Of course I know that," Agnes told him, more than a little indignantly. She was in her early thirties, not far from his own age, and had been another soldier's widow before meeting him at a dance back in Leavenworth. She had brown eyes; her black hair, these days, was cut short in what the fashion magazines called a shingle bob. It was all the rage at the moment. Morrell didn't think it quite suited his wife, but didn't intend to tell her so. As far as he could see, such things were her business, not his. She went on, "Supper will be ready in a few minutes."

"Smells good." Morrell's nostrils flared. Compared to some of the things he'd eaten in Sonora and the Canadian Rockies and Kentucky and Tennessee, it smelled very good indeed. "What is it?" Back on the battlefield, there'd been plenty of times he hadn't wanted to know. Horse? Donkey? Cat? Buzzard? He couldn't prove it, which meant he didn't have to think about it… too often.

"Chicken stew with dumplings and carrots," Agnes said. "That's the way you like it, isn't it?"

Spit flooded his mouth as he nodded. "I knew I married you for a couple of reasons," he said.

"A couple of reasons?" Her eyebrows, plucked thin, flew up in mock surprise. "What on earth could the other one be?"

He walked over to her and let his hand rest lightly on her belly for a moment. "We'll find out if it's a boy or a girl sooner than we think."

"It won't be tomorrow," Agnes reminded him. She'd been sure she was in a family way for only a few weeks. There wasn't much doubt any more; not only had her time of the month twice failed to come, but she was perpetually sleepy. And she had trouble keeping food down. She gave Irving Morrell a much bigger helping than she took for herself, and she ate warily.

When they undressed for bed that night, he used a forefinger to follow the new tracery of blue veins that had sprung out on Agnes' breasts. She gave him a mischievous smile. "All those veins probably remind you of the rivers on a campaign map."

"Well, I wouldn't have thought of it just that way," Morrell answered, cupping her breast in the palm of her hand. "What sort of campaign did you have in mind, honey?"

"Oh, I expect you'll think of something," she answered. He squeezed, gently-but not quite gently enough. The corners of her mouth turned down. "They're sore. People say you get over that, but I haven't yet."

He tried to be more careful, and evidently succeeded, for things went on from there. When they'd progressed a good deal further, Agnes climbed on top of him. The idea had startled him when she first proposed it; he'd always thought a man belonged in the saddle. But she didn't have his weight on her tender breasts this way-and, he'd discovered, it was fine no matter who went where.

A couple of days later, he got called to General Hunter Liggett's office. With General Liggett was a tall, long-faced man five or ten years older than Morrell. "Colonel, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war."

"Pleased to meet you, sir." Morrell lied without hesitation. Thomas was the man who'd gone up to Canada to put General Custer out to pasture. Morrell still didn't know if Custer was a good general. He had his doubts, in fact. But Custer had turned a whole great assault column of barrels loose against the CSA, and Morrell had ridden a barrel at the head of that column. Without the breakthroughs they'd won, the Great War might still be going on.

"Likewise, Colonel. I'm very glad to meet you." N. Mattoon Thomas was probably lying, too. In the Army, it was an axiom of faith that the Socialists wanted to get rid of everything that had let the USA win the war. That Thomas had forced George Custer into retirement didn't speak well for him, not in Morrell's eyes.

Hunter Liggett said, "Colonel, I passed your memorandum on the unfortunate situation in Armenia to the assistant secretary here, in the hope that he might send it on to the Department of State."

"A very perceptive document," Thomas said. "I dare hope it will do some good, although one never knows. Very perceptive indeed." He studied Morrell as an entomologist might study a new species of beetle. "I should hardly have expected such a thing from a soldier."

Morrell gave him a smile that was all sharp teeth. "Sorry, sir. We don't gas grandmothers and burn babies all the time."

Silence slammed down in General Liggett's office. The head of the General Staff broke it, saying, "What Colonel Morrell meant, sir, was-"

"I know perfectly well what Colonel Morrell meant," Thomas said, his voice cold as the middle of a meat locker. "He resents my party for telling him he may not play with big iron toys forever and tell the American people, 'Hang the expense! We may need these one day.' I wear his resentment as a badge of honor." He gave Morrell a nod that was almost a bow. "And what have you got to say about that, Colonel? You seem in an outspoken mood today."

"I've never said, 'Hang the expense,' sir," Morrell answered. "But we may need better barrels one day, and they aren't toys. If your party thinks what we do is play, why not get rid of the Army altogether, and the Navy, too?"

Before Thomas could reply, the telephone on General Liggett's desk rang. He snatched it up. "Confound it, you know what sort of meeting I'm in," he snapped, from which Morrell concluded he was talking to Lieutenant Colonel Abell in the outer office. But then Liggett said, "What? What's that?" Color drained from his face, leaving it corpse-yellow. "Dear God in heaven," he whispered, and hung up.

"What is it?" Morrell and N. Mattoon Thomas said the same thing at the same time.

General Liggett stared blindly from one of them to the other. Tears glistened in his eyes. All at once, he looked like an old, old man. "Teddy Roosevelt is dead," he said, sounding as stunned and disbelieving as a shell-shocked soldier. "He was playing a round of golf outside Syracuse, and he fell over, and he didn't get up. Cerebral hemorrhage, they think."

"Oh, my God." Again, Morrell and Thomas spoke together. Thomas might be a Socialist, but Theodore Roosevelt had been a mighty force in the United States for more than forty years. No one, regardless of party, could be indifferent to that.

So far Morrell thought, and no further. Then what he'd just heard really hit him. To his amazement and shame and dismay, he began to weep. A moment later, blurrily, he saw tears running down the faces of Hunter Liggett and N. Mattoon Thomas, too.

C ongresswoman Flora Blackford should have been packing for the trip from Philadelphia to Chicago, for the Socialist Party's nominating convention. President Upton Sinclair would surely get his party's nod for a second term: the Socialists' first president, elected almost forty years after the modern Socialist Party began in Chicago, when in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War Abraham Lincoln led the Republican left wing out of one organization and into another.

Yes, the presidential nomination was a foregone conclusion. The vice presidency? Flora smiled to herself. The vice presidency was a forgone conclusion, too. Nothing in the world, as far as she could see, would keep Hosea Blackford, her husband, from getting the nomination again. And then, in 1928… He'd once said he didn't expect to get the nod for the top of the ticket then. Maybe, though, maybe he was wrong.

Such things were what she should have been thinking about-what she had been thinking about up till a few days before. Now she put her most somber clothes into a suitcase. She wouldn't be going to Chicago, not yet, and neither would her husband. She'd always wanted to visit the city where the modern Party was born, and she would-but not yet. Instead, she packed for the short trip down to Washington, D.C., for the funeral of Theodore Roosevelt.

Hosea Blackford came into the bedroom carrying black trousers and a white shirt. As he put them in the suitcase, he shook his head. "I'm almost as old as Teddy Roosevelt, and I still feel as though my father just died."

Both of Flora's parents were still alive, but she nodded. "Everybody in the whole country feels that way, near enough," she answered. "We didn't always like him-"

"If we were Socialists, we practically never liked him," Hosea Blackford said.

Nodding, Flora went on, "But whether we liked him or not, he made us what we are. He raised us. He raised this whole country. It's no wonder we feel lost without him."

"No wonder at all," her husband said over his shoulder as he went back to the hall closet for a black jacket and a black homburg. "He was always sure he knew what was best for us. He wasn't always right, but he was always sure." He chuckled. "Sounds like my pa, I'll tell you that." His flat Great Plains accent was a world away from her Yiddish-flavored New York City speech.

He went back for a black cravat. Flora closed the suitcase. "Are we ready to go?" she asked.

"I expect so." He looked out the window of the flat that had been his alone-across the hall from hers-which they now shared. A motorcar waited in front of the building. Grunting, he picked up the suitcase.

When they went outside, the driver saw him carrying it and rushed to take it from him. Grudgingly, Blackford surrendered it. He gave Flora a wry grin. Ever since she was elected to Congress, she'd wrestled with the problem of the privileges members of government-even Socialist members of government-enjoyed. For all her wrestling, for all her commitment to class struggle, she had yet to come to a conclusion that satisfied her.

She and her husband enjoyed even more privilege on the southbound train: a fancy Pullman car all to themselves, and food brought to them from the diner. When they got to Washington, another motorcar whisked them to the White House.

The flag in front of the famous building flew at half staff. The White House itself looked much as it had before the Great War. Repairs there had been finished almost a year before. The Washington Monument off to the south, however, remained a truncated stub of its former self. Scaffolding surrounded it; it would rise again to its full majestic height.

"If there's ever another war, all this work will go to waste," Flora said.

"One more reason there'd better not be another war," her husband answered, and she nodded.

President Upton Sinclair met them in the downstairs entry hall. After shaking hands with his vice president and kissing Flora on the cheek, he said, "I would sooner have done this in Philadelphia, but Roosevelt left word he wanted the ceremony here, and I couldn't very well say no."

"Hardly," Hosea Blackford agreed. "What does it feel like? — staying in the White House, I mean."

"Well, look at the place. I feel as though I were living in a museum." Sinclair waved. He was a tall, slim man in his mid-forties: the youngest man ever elected president. His youthful vigor had served him well in 1920, when Teddy Roosevelt, even then past sixty, could be seen as a man whose time, however great, had passed him by. The president shook his head. "It's even worse than living in a museum. It's the reproduction of a museum. They didn't get a whole lot out of here before the Confederates bombarded the place in 1914. Frankly, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. The Powel House doesn't make me think I'll get thrown out if I speak above a whisper."

Flora found herself nodding. "It is more like the American Museum of Natural History than any place where you'd want to stay, isn't it?"

"That's right." President Sinclair nodded emphatically.

"Strange that we should be doing the honors for Roosevelt," Hosea Blackford observed.

"He was a great man," Flora said. "A class enemy, but a great man."

"Easier to admire a foe, especially an able one, after he's gone," Sinclair said.

Like a lot of men largely self-taught-Abraham Lincoln had been the same-her husband was fond of quoting Shakespeare: " 'Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.'

"An American Caesar." President Sinclair nodded. "That fits."

But Flora shook her head. "No. If he'd been Caesar, he never would have given up the presidency when he lost four years ago. He would have called out the troops instead. And if Teddy Roosevelt had called them, they might have marched, too."

No one cared to contemplate that. Hosea Blackford said, "Well, he's gone now, and… 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.' "

"And we'll give him a grand funeral, too," the president added. "We can afford to do that. He's a lot easier to deal with dead than he was alive."

Sleeping in the Mahan Bedroom felt strange to Flora; it was as big as the flat in which she and her whole family had lived in New York. The next morning, a colored servant-a reminder that Washington had once been closely aligned with the states now forming the Confederacy-brought her and her husband bacon and eggs and fried potatoes. She ate the eggs and potatoes; her husband demolished her bacon along with his own. "I shouldn't, I suppose," he said.

"Don't worry about it. I don't," she answered, which was true most of the time. Only later did she wonder in what the eggs and potatoes had been cooked. Bacon grease? Lard? She was Socialist and secular and very Jewish, all at the same time, and every so often one piece bounced off another and left her unsure of what she ought to feel.

Tens-hundreds-of thousands of people lined the route from the Capitol to the remains of the Washington Monument and then south. She and Hosea Blackford took their places on a reviewing stand near the Monument to watch Theodore Roosevelt's funeral procession, along with members of Congress and some foreign dignitaries: she recognized the ambassador from the Confederate States, who stood close by his colleagues from Britain, France, and the Empire of Mexico in a glum knot. No one else came very close to them.

Down among the ordinary spectators near the stand were a middle-aged woman wearing a gaudy medal-the Order of Remembrance, First Class-and a younger one who looked like her with the slightly less flamboyant Order of Remembrance, Second Class, hanging around her neck. They both held young children. The gray-haired man with them, who had a Distinguished Service Medal on his black jacket, said, "If she gets fussy, Nellie, give her to me."

"I will, Hal," the older woman answered. Flora wondered what she'd done during the war to earn such an important decoration.

She never found out. Indeed, a moment later, she forgot all about the people in the crowd, for flourishes of muffled drums announced that the procession was approaching. Behind the drummers-one each from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard-came a riderless black horse led by a soldier. As the animal slowly walked past, Flora saw that it had reversed boots thrust into the stirrups and a sheathed sword lashed to the saddle.

Six white horses, teamed in twos, drew the black caisson carrying Roosevelt's body in a flag-draped coffin. All six of the horses were saddled. The saddles of the three on the right were empty; a soldier, a sailor, and a Marine rode the three on the left.

President Upton Sinclair, in somber black, marched bareheaded behind the caisson, along with some of Roosevelt's relatives-including one man of about Flora's age who had to be pushed along in a wheelchair. She wondered what sort of injury he'd taken in the war that had crippled him so.

The premier of the Republic of Quebec strode along a few paces after Sinclair and the Roosevelt family, accompanied by a couple of Central American heads of state who'd taken a fast liner to reach the USA in time for the funeral. After them came the ambassadors from the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire: the great wartime allies, given pride of place. Envoys from Chile and Paraguay and the Empire of Brazil came next, followed by other emissaries from Europe and the Americas-and the ambassador from the Empire of Japan, elegant in a black cutaway. Alone of all the Entente nations, Japan hadn't yielded to the Central Powers. She'd just stopped fighting. It wasn't the same thing, and everyone knew it.

After the foreign dignitaries marched a band playing soft, somber music. Another riderless horse brought up the rear of the procession. Flora found that excessive, but nobody'd asked her opinion. And the Socialist Party, being in power, did have an obligation to send the departed Roosevelt to his final rest with as much grandeur as possible, to keep the Democrats from screaming about indifference or worse.

Once the procession had passed the reviewing stand, it turned south, toward the Potomac. The crowds there were just as thick as they had been between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. The sounds of weeping rose above the music of the band. "Say what you will, the people loved him," Hosea Blackford remarked.

"I know." Flora shook her head in wonder. "In spite of the war he led them into, they loved him." That war had cost her brother-in-law his life and her brother a leg. And David voted Democratic despite-or maybe because of-that missing leg, though he'd been a Socialist before.

Her husband said, "Well, he won it, no matter how much it cost. And now he gets his last revenge on the Confederate States." He chuckled in reluctant admiration.

Flora didn't know whether to admire Teddy Roosevelt's final gesture or to be appalled by it. On the southern bank of the Potomac, in what had been Virginia but was now annexed to U.S. West Virginia, Robert E. Lee had had an estate. Since the Great War rolled over it, it had lain in ruins. That hadn't bothered Roosevelt at all. He'd left instructions-and President Sinclair had agreed-that his last resting place should be on the grounds of Arlington.

C larence Potter paid two cents for a copy of the Charleston Mercury. "Thanks very much," he told the boy from whom he bought it.

"You're welcome, sir," the boy said, the thick drawl of the old South Carolina coastal city flavoring his speech. He cocked his head to one side. "You a Yankee, sir? You sure don't talk like you're from hereabouts."

"Not me, son." Potter shook his head. The motion threatened to dislodge his steel-framed spectacles. He set them more firmly on the bridge of his long, thin nose. "I came to Charleston after the war, though. I grew up in Virginia."

"Oh." The newsboy relaxed. He probably hadn't gone more than ten miles outside of Charleston in his whole life, and wouldn't have known a Virginia accent from one from Massachusetts or Minnesota.

Holding his newspaper so he could read as he walked, Potter hurried down Queen Street toward the harbor. He moved like an ex-soldier, head up, shoulders back. And he had been a soldier-he'd served as a major in intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the war. His accent had aroused some talk, and some suspicion, there, too. Even men who knew accents thought he sounded too much like a Yankee for comfort. And so he did; not long before the war, he'd gone to Yale, and the way people spoke in New Haven had rubbed off on him.

Below the fold on the front page was an account of a speech by Jake Featherston, raising holy hell because Teddy Roosevelt's bones were resting in the sacred soil of Virginia. Potter clucked and rolled his eyes and made as if to chuck the paper into the first trash can he saw. He would have bet Featherston would make a speech like that. But in the end, he didn't throw away the Mercury. He opened it and read till he'd seen as much of the speech as it reprinted.

He clicked his tongue between his teeth as he refolded the newspaper. Featherston would pick up points for what he'd said. Damn Teddy Roosevelt and his arrogance, Potter thought. As far as he was concerned, anything that helped the Freedom Party was bad for the Confederate States of America.

He'd got to know Jake Featherston pretty well during the war. Featherston had made the fatal mistake of being right when he said Jeb Stuart III's Negro servant, Pompey, was in fact a Red rebel. Young Captain Stuart, not believing it, had got Pompey off the hook, only to have his treason proved when the Negro uprising broke out a little while later. Stuart had gone into action seeking death after that, and, on a Great War battlefield, death was never hard to find.

General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a hero of the Second Mexican War, was a power in the War Department in Richmond. He'd made sure Jake Featherston, who'd been right about his son's error in judgment, never got promoted above the rank of sergeant no matter how well he fought-and Jake fought very well indeed. For that matter, Potter himself had also been involved in uncovering Jeb Stuart III's mistake, and he'd advanced only one grade in three years himself.

But his failure to get promoted affected only him. Had Jeb Stuart, Jr., relented and given Featherston the officer's rank he deserved, the CSA would have been saved endless grief. Clarence Potter was sure of that. Featherston had been taking out his rage and frustration against Confederate authorities ever since.

I knew even then he was monstrous good at hating, Potter thought. Did I ever imagine, while the fighting was going on, that he'd turn out to be as good at it as he has? He shook his head. He was honest enough to admit to himself that he hadn't. He'd thought Jake Featherston would disappear into obscurity once the war ended. Most men-almost all men-would have. The exceptions were the ones who had to be dealt with.

For the time being, it looked as if Featherston had been dealt with. Not so long before, his speech would have stood at the top of the front page, not below the fold. He was a falling star these days. With luck, he wouldn't rise again.

When Potter got to the harbor, he stiffened. A U.S. Navy gunboat was tied up at one of the quays. Seeing the Stars and Stripes here, where the Confederacy was born and the War of Secession began, raised his hackles. The flag stood out; the C.S. Navy used the Confederate battle flag as its ensign, not the Stars and Bars that so closely resembled the U.S. banner. And the U.S. Navy men's dark blue uniforms also contrasted with the dark gray their Confederate counterparts wore.

These days, Clarence Potter made his living as an investigator. He'd been looking into smuggling going through the harbor, and had headed there to report his findings to the harbormaster. But that warship flying the hated Northern flag drew him as a magnet drew iron.

He wasn't the only one, either. Men in both C.S. naval uniform and in civilian clothes converged on the U.S. gunboat. "Yankees, go home!" somebody yelled. Scores of throats roared agreement, Potter's among them.

"Avast that shouting!" a U.S. officer on the deck of the gunboat bawled through a megaphone. "We've got every right to be here under the armistice agreement, and you know it damned well. We're inspecting to make sure you Confederates aren't building submersibles in these parts. If you interfere with us while we're doing our duty, you'll be sorry, and so will your whole stinking country."

They love us no better than we love them, Clarence Potter reminded himself. And that lieutenant commander had a point. If he and his men couldn't make their inspection, the CSA would pay, in humiliation and maybe in gold as well. The Yankees had learned their lessons well; as victors, they were even more intolerable than the Confederates had been.

"Yankees, go home!" the crowd on the quay shouted, over and over.

At a barked order, the sailors on the gunboat swung their forward cannon to bear on the crowd. The gun was only a three-incher-a popgun by naval standards-but it could work a fearful slaughter if turned on soft flesh rather than steel armor. Sudden silence descended.

"That's better," the U.S. officer said. "If you think we won't open fire, you'd goddamn well better think again."

"You'll never get out of this harbor if you do," somebody called.

The U.S. lieutenant commander had spunk. He shrugged. "Maybe we will, maybe we won't. But if you want to start a brand new war against the United States of America, go right ahead. If you start it, we'll finish it."

No one from the United States would have talked like that before the Great War. The Confederate States had been on top of the world then. No more. The Yankees had the whip hand nowadays. And people in Charleston knew it. The crowd in front of the U.S. gunboat dispersed sullenly, but it dispersed. Some of the men who walked away knuckled their eyes to hold back tears. The Confederates were a proud folk, and choking on that pride came hard.

Potter made his way to the harbormaster's office. That worthy, a plump man named Ambrose Spawforth, fumed about Yankee arrogance. "Those sons of bitches don't own the world, no matter what they think," he said.

"You know that, and I know that, but do the damnyankees know it?" Potter answered. "I'll tell you something else I know: the way that bastard in a blue jacket acted, he just handed the Freedom Party a raft of new votes."

Spawforth was normally a man with a good deal of common sense. When he said, "Well, good," a chill ran through Clarence Potter. The harbormaster went on, "Isn't it about time we start standing up to the USA again?"

"That depends," Potter said judiciously. "Standing up to them isn't such a good idea if they go and knock us down again. Right now, they can do that, you know."

"Don't I just!" Spawforth said. "We're weaklings now. We need to get strong again. We can do it. We will do it, too."

"Not behind Jake Featherston." Potter spoke with absolute conviction.

But he didn't impress Spawforth, no matter how certain he sounded. The fat man said, "He'll tell the Yankees off. He'll tell the niggers off. He'll tell the fools in Richmond off, too. That all needs doing, every bit of it."

One of Potter's eyebrows rose. "Splendid," he said. "And what happens after he tells the Yankees off?"

"Huh?" Plainly, that hadn't occurred to Spawforth.

"The likeliest thing is, they take some more of our land or they make us start paying them reparations again," Potter said. "We aren't strong enough to stop them, you know. Do you want another round of inflation to wipe out the currency?"

He was-he always had been-a coldly logical man. That made it easy for him to resist, even to laugh at, Jake Featherston's fervent speechmaking. It also made him have trouble understanding why so many people took Featherston seriously. Ambrose Spawforth was one of those people. "Well, what we need to do is get strong enough so the USA can't kick us around any more," he said. "The Freedom Party's for that, too."

"Splendid," Potter said again, even more sardonically than before. "We tell the United States we aim to kick them in the teeth as soon as we get the chance. I'm sure they'll just go right ahead and let us."

"You've got the wrong attitude, you know that?" the harbormaster said. "You don't understand the way things work."

What Potter understood was that you couldn't have whatever you wanted just because you wanted it. Even if you held your breath till you turned blue, that didn't mean you were entitled to it. As far as he could see, the Freedom Party hadn't figured that out and didn't want to.

He also understood getting deeper into an argument with Spawforth would do him no good at all. The man didn't have to hire him to snoop around the harbor. Yes, he'd been in intelligence during the war. But plenty of beady-eyed, needle-nosed men were at liberty in Charleston these days. A lot of them could do his job, and do it about as well as he did.

And so, however much he wanted to prove to the world at large-and to Ambrose Spawforth in particular-that Spawforth was an ass, an imbecile, an idiot, he restrained himself. Instead of laying into the man, he said only, "Well, I didn't come here to fight about politics with you, Mr. Spawforth. I came to tell you about the fellows who're sneaking dirty moving pictures into the CSA and taking tobacco out."

"Tobacco? So that's what they're getting for that filthy stuff, is it?" Spawforth said, and Potter nodded. The harbormaster looked shrewd. "If it's tobacco, they're likely Yankees. I would've reckoned 'em some other kind of foreigners-goddamn Germans, maybe-from the girls on the films, but they don't talk or nothin', so I couldn't prove it."

"Yes, the films are coming in from the USA. I'm sure of that." Potter looked at Ambrose Spawforth over the tops of his spectacles. "So you've seen some of these moving pictures, have you?"

The harbormaster turned red. "It was in the line of duty, damn it. Have to know what's going on, don't I? I'd look like a right chucklehead if I didn't know what all was coming through Charleston harbor."

He had enough of a point to keep Potter from pressing him. And the veteran, in the course of his own duties, had seen some of the films himself. He didn't think the girls looked German. They were certainly limber, though. He took some papers from his briefcase. "Here's my report-and my bill."

J onathan Moss hadn't taken up the law to help Canadians gain justice from the U.S. occupying authorities. Such thoughts, in fact, had been as distant from his mind as the far side of the moon before the Great War started. He'd spent the whole war as an American pilot in Ontario, beginning in observation aircraft and ending in fighting scouts. He'd come through without a scratch and as an ace. Not many of the men who'd started the war with him were still there at the end. He knew exactly how lucky he was to be here these days, and not to need a cane or a hook or a patch over one eye.

U.S. forces had planned to take Toronto within a few weeks of the war's beginning. But the Canadians and the English had had plans of their own. The U.S. Army had taken three years to get there. Almost every inch of ground around Lake Erie from Niagara Falls to Toronto had seen shells land on it. The city itself…

Having spent a lot of time shooting it up from the air, Moss knew what sort of shape Toronto had been in when the fighting finally stopped. It was far from the only Canadian place in such condition, either. Towns came back to life only little by little. Wrecked buildings got demolished, new ones went up to take their places. But the key words were little by little. Canadians, these days, didn't have much money, and the American government was anything but interested in helping them with their troubles.

That meant a lot of people doing the wrecking and the rebuilding weren't Canadians at all, but fast-buck artists up from the States. That was certainly true in Berlin, where Moss had has practice. (The town had briefly been known as Empire during the war, but had reverted to its original name after the Americans finally drove out stubborn Canadian and British defenders.) Americans in conquered Canada often behaved as if the law were for other people, not for them. Sometimes the military government looked the other way or encouraged them to act like that.

Moss had defended one Canadian's right to reclaim a building he incontrovertibly owned-that it was the building where he'd had his office made the case especially interesting for him. Not only had he taken the case, he'd won it. That got him more such business. These days, most of his clients were Canucks. Some of his own countrymen accused him of being more Canadian than the Canadians. He took it as praise, though doubting they meant it that way.

And, when Saturday rolled around and the courts closed till the following Monday, he got into his powerful Bucephalus and roared off to the west. The motorcar did more to prove his family had money than to prove he did. The road to the little town of Arthur proved nobody in the province of Ontario had much money to set things to rights.

What had been shell holes in ground torn down to the bone were now ponds or simply grassy dimples in fertile soil. Rain and ice and grass and bushes softened the outlines of the trenches that had furrowed the countryside like scourge marks on a bare back. Even the ugly lumps of concrete that marked machine-gun nests and larger fortifications were beginning to soften with the passage of time, weathering and getting a coating of moss. Though cities were slow in recovering, the farmland in the countryside was back in business. Several trucks hauling broken concrete and rusted barbed wire back toward scrap dealers in Berlin or Toronto passed Moss on the opposite side of the road.

Here and there, fresh barbed wire stayed up: not in the thickets of the stuff used during the war, but single, sometimes double, strands. Signboards showed a skull and crossbones and a two-word warning in big red letters: DANGER! MINES! How long will those mines stay in the ground? Moss wondered.

From Berlin over to Arthur was about thirty miles. Even with his powerful automobile, Moss needed almost an hour and a half to get to the little farm outside of Arthur. That wasn't the Bucephalus' fault, but the road's-especially after rains like the ones they'd had a couple of days earlier, it was truly appalling.

His squadron had been stationed at an aerodrome only a mile or so from this little farm. It had been stationed here for a long time; the front hadn't moved fast enough to make frequent relocations necessary. And so Jonathan Moss, wandering the countryside in search of whatever-and whomever-he might find, had got to know a woman whose maiden name, she'd bragged, was Laura Secord.

She was named for a relative who'd made herself famous during the War of 1812, warning that the Americans were coming in much the same way as Paul Revere had warned that the British were coming during the Revolution. If that hadn't been enough to make her a Canadian patriot, she'd been married to a soldier who was either missing or captured.

She hadn't wanted to look at Jonathan. He'd certainly wanted to look at her. She was tall and blond and shapely and pretty-and she was more of a man than most of the men he knew. She could take care of herself. In fact, she insisted on taking care of herself. He'd come back right after the war ended. Her husband hadn't. She sent him off with a flea in his ear anyhow.

But, when she was desperate for money to keep from being taxed off the farm, she'd written to him while he was in law school. He'd lent it to her. That had helped ease him into her good graces, though she'd paid back every dime. Helping that fellow over in Berlin regain his building had done far more. Any practical-minded American would say what happened mattered more than how it happened. Now…

Now, when Moss pulled onto the track that led from the road to her farmhouse and barn, he squeezed the bulb on the motorcar's horn. The raucous noise made a cow look up from the long, green grass it was cropping. The cow didn't act too startled. It had heard that noise before.

So had Laura Secord. Moss stopped the automobile just in front of her house. She came toward him, nodding a greeting. She carried a headless chicken, still dripping blood, by the feet. A hatchet was buried in a red-stained stump that did duty for a chopping block.

"Hello, Yank," she said, and held up the chicken. "Once I settle her, she'll make us a fine stew. Her laying's down, so I don't care about culling her."

"Suits me," Moss said. "How have you been?"

"Not bad," she replied.

By a year's custom, they were decorous with each other as long as they stayed outside, which made Moss want to hurry into the farmhouse. But this… Moss frowned. She sounded more-or rather, less-than merely decorous. He asked, "Is something wrong?"

She didn't answer right away. When she did, all she said was, "We can talk about it a little later, if that's all right."

"Sure. Whatever you want." Moss didn't see what else he could say. He wondered if he'd done something to put her nose out of joint. He didn't think so, but how could a mere male-worse, an American male-know for sure?

When they went inside, she gutted the chicken and threw the offal out for the farm cats, which were the wildest beasts Moss had ever known. She plucked the carcass with automatic competence, hardly looking at what her hands were doing. Then she got a fire going in the stove, cut up the bird, threw it in a pot with carrots and onions and potatoes and a cabbage, and put it over the fire to cook.

As soon as she'd got the chicken stew going, he expected her to throw herself into his arms. That was how things had gone since they became lovers. When they got inside the farmhouse, all bets were off. The first time they'd gone to bed together, they hadn't gone to bed. He'd taken her on the kitchen floor. If she hadn't got splinters in her behind, it wasn't because he hadn't rammed her against the floorboards.

Today, though, she shook her head when he took a step toward her. "We need to talk," she said.

"What about?" Moss asked with a sinking feeling worse than any he'd known while diving to escape an enemy pilot. Whenever a woman said something like that, the first careless joy of two people as a couple was over.

"Come into the parlor," Laura Secord told him. That surprised him, too; she hardly ever used the impressive-looking room. He'd walked past it on the way to the stairs that led to her bedroom, but he wasn't sure he'd ever actually been inside it. What could he do now, though, but nod and let her lead the way?

At her gesture, he sat down on the sofa. The upholstery crackled under his weight; the sofa wasn't used to working. On the table in front of the sofa stood a framed photograph of her late husband in Canadian uniform. Moss had resolutely forgotten his surname; thinking of Laura by her maiden name made it easier for him to forget the dead man altogether. But how could you forget someone whose image stared at you out of eyes that looked hard and dangerous?

The chair in which Laura Secord sat also made noises that suggested it wasn't used to having anyone actually sit in it. She looked at Moss, but didn't say anything. "You were the one who wanted to talk," he reminded her. "I asked you once, what about?"

She bit her lip and looked away. Something close to a sob burst from her. She's going to send me packing, Moss thought with sudden sick certainty. She can't stand a damn Yank rumpling her drawers any more, no matter how much she likes it. What do I do then? he wondered, panic somewhere not far under the surface of his mind. He'd spent years alternately chasing her and trying-always without much luck-to get her out of his mind. Now that he'd finally got her, finally found out just how much woman she was, losing her was the last thing he wanted. But two had to say yes. One was plenty for no.

"What is it?" he said again, like a man bracing himself for the dentist's drill. "After this buildup, don't you think you'd better tell me?"

Laura nodded jerkily. But then, instead of talking, she sprang up to light a kerosene lamp. The yellow glow added enough light to the parlor for him to see how pale she was. Another thought intruded on him- she's going to have a baby. He gave a tiny shrug. We'll deal with that, dammit. Shakespeare's first kid came along seven months after he got married. The world won't end.

She sat down again, biting her lip. Moss' nostrils twitched-not at the way she was behaving, but because he'd just got the first whiff of the stew. At last she said, so low he had to lean forward to hear her (which made the couch rustle again), "There's going to be… an uprising. Here. In Canada. Against… against the United…" She didn't get States out. Instead, she buried her face in her hands and wept as if her heart were breaking.

It probably is, Moss realized. "Why are you telling me? I thought you'd be…"

"Cheering them on?" Laura asked. He nodded, though leading them on was more what he'd had in mind. She said, "Because I don't want you to get hurt. Because I-" She stopped again.

"Well!" he said, quite taken aback. He didn't say anything else for close to a minute; what man wouldn't savor such a compliment? She cares for me, he thought dizzily, and not just for my… He shook his head and asked the other question that needed asking: "How do you know about this?"

Laura looked at him as if he'd been foolish. And so I have, he decided. She answered as she might have to a child: "I am who I am-I am what I am-after all."

"They thought you'd be cheering them on, too," Moss said. "Cheering them on or helping them, I mean."

"Yes." In the one word, Laura Secord unwittingly spoke volumes on how close they'd come to being right. Then she burst into tears. When Moss tried to comfort her, she pushed him away as fiercely as if he were still the enemy she'd thought him for so long.

L ucien Galtier took life a day at a time. As far as he could see, that was a good idea for any man, and an especially good idea for a farmer like himself. Sometimes you got sunshine, sometimes rain or snow or just clouds. Sometimes you got peace. Sometimes, he'd seen, you got war.

Sometimes you got a whole new country. He still had trouble remembering he lived in the Republic of Quebec. The USA had invaded the Canadian province of Quebec and found enough men willing to detach it from its longtime home to make a new nation. Without the United States, my country would not be, Galtier thought.

That had been a very strange notion, the first time it crossed his mind. By now, though, he'd realized the United States did as they pleased all through North America. When they point at this one and say Come! he cometh, and when they point at that one and say Go! he goeth.

"That's from the Bible, isn't it?" his wife asked when he spoke the thought aloud to her.

"I think so, Marie," he answered, scratching his head as he tried to remember where he'd found the language in which he robed his thought. He wasn't a tall man, or broad through the shoulders; his strength was of the wiry sort that didn't show. It was also of the wiry sort that endured after a bigger man's youthful power faded with the passing years. He'd seen his fiftieth birthday. The only real difference between it and his fortieth was that he'd gone gray over the past ten years. He'd had only a few silver strands among the midnight at forty. Now the black hairs were the ones that were few and far between.

Marie, as far as he could tell, hadn't aged a day. He marveled at how she'd managed that. She'd lived with him for thirty years now. If that wasn't enough to give her gray hair, nothing ever would.

She said, "The Romans in our Lord's day didn't use their power for good, did they?"

"I don't know these things," Lucien exclaimed. "If you wanted someone who knows about Romans, you shouldn't have married a farmer." He raised a sly eyebrow. "Maybe you should have married Bishop Pascal."

"You're trying to make me angry," Marie said. "You're doing a good job of it, too. It's not so much that Bishop Pascal can't marry. It's thinking I might want to marry him if he could. You could squeeze enough oil out of that man to light a house for a year."

"But it would be sweet oil," Galtier said. His wife made a face at him.

Before they could start up again, Georges, their younger son, came into the farmhouse with a newspaper from Riviere-du-Loup in his hand. "They've gone and done it!" he said, waving the paper at Lucien and Marie.

"Who has gone and done what?" Lucien Galtier asked. With Georges with newspaper in hand, he might settle on anything. Charles, his older brother, was much more like the elder Galtier, both in looks and character. Georges towered over his father-and also, as he had since he was a boy, delighted in whimsy for its own sake. Had someone gone and hauled a cow onto a roof? Georges might well make a story like that out to be the end of the world.

Not this time, though. "The Canadians have risen against the United States!" he said, and held the paper still long enough to let his father and mother see the big black headline.

"Calisse!" Galtier muttered. "Mauvais tabernac!" Marie clucked at his swearing, but he didn't care. He reached for the newspaper. "Oh, the fools! The stupid fools!" He crossed himself.

"They'll get what's coming to them," Georges said. He took the Republic of Quebec for granted. He'd lived the last third of his life in it. To him, as his words showed, Canada was a foreign country.

Things were different for Lucien. Back in the 1890s, he'd been conscripted into the Canadian Army. He'd soldiered side by side with men who spoke English. He'd learned some himself; its remembered fragments had come in handy in ways he hadn't expected. He'd also been told, "Talk white!" when he spouted French at the wrong time. Despite that, though, he'd seen that English-speaking Canadians weren't so very different from their Quebecois counterparts. And memories of when Quebec had been part of something stretching from Atlantic to Pacific remained strong in him.

"Give me the paper," he said. "I want to see what they say about this."

Something in his tone warned Georges this would not be a good time to argue or joke. "Here, Papa," he said, and handed him the newspaper without another word.

Galtier had to hold it out at arm's length to read it. His sight had lengthened over the past ten years, too. "Shall I get your reading glasses?" Marie asked. "I know where you left them-on the nightstand by the bed."

"Never mind," he answered. "I can manage well enough… Uprisings in Toronto and Ottawa and Winnipeg, in Calgary and Edmonton and Vancouver."

"The Americans say they are putting them down," Georges said.

"Of course they say that. What else would you expect them to say?" Galtier replied. "During the war, both sides told lies as fast as they could. The Americans must have captured Quebec City and Montreal and Toronto half a dozen times each-and they must have been chased south over the border just as often."

Georges pointed to a paragraph Lucien was about to read on his own. "The premier of the Republic is sending soldiers to help his American allies-that's what he calls it, anyhow."

" 'Osti," Galtier muttered. He wasn't surprised so much as disgusted. He'd been thinking of the Bible. The Americans were saying Come! — and the Quebecois were duly coming. Or was that fair? Didn't allies help allies? Weren't Quebec and the USA allies? Why wouldn't French-speaking troops in blue-gray help Americans in green-gray?

"Can the Canadians win, do you think?" Georges asked. He certainly thought of his former countrymen as foreigners.

"No." Galtier shook his head. "The Americans are soft in certain things-they have certainly been softer here in Quebec than they might have been." Yes, he had to admit that. "But think even of your brother-in-law. Remember what he thinks of the British. The United States will not be kind in Canada. They will crucify the whole country, and they will laugh while they are doing it."

"The Canadians are brave," his son said.

"They're foolish," Galtier replied.

"Haven't we seen enough war? Haven't we seen too much war?" Marie said. Actually, this part of Quebec had fallen to the Americans fairly fast. It had seen occupation, but not too much true combat. Near Montreal, near Quebec City, the story was different.

" They don't think so." Georges sounded excited. He knows no better, Galtier thought. War around here hadn't seemed too bad.

"Listen to this, son," Galtier said after turning the paper to an inside page so he could see the rest of the story. "Listen carefully. 'American occupying authorities vow that these uprisings will be put down, and all rebels punished under martial law. This is a rebellion against duly constituted authority, not a war; captured rebels do not have the privileges granted to legitimate prisoners of war.' Do you know what that means? Do you understand it?"

"I think so, Father." Georges, for once, sounded serious. He didn't try to make a joke of it.

Lucien Galtier spelled things out anyhow: "It means the Americans will hang or shoot anyone they catch who rose up against them. They won't waste time with a lot of questions before they do it, either."

"And we take money from the Americans for the hospital they built on our patrimony," Georges said. "We even have an American in our family."

"You have a half-American nephew," Galtier replied. "You have an American brother-in-law, as I have an American son-in-law. And Leonard O'Doull is a good fellow and a good doctor, and you cannot say otherwise."

"Nooo," Georges admitted reluctantly. "But if they're doing these things in Canada-"

"They're doing them because the Canadians have risen up," Galtier said. "If the Canadians had stayed quiet, none of this would have happened. None of it has happened here in Quebec, n'est-ce pas? "

"Oui, tu as raison, Papa," Georges said. "But even if you are right, is it not that we have made a deal with the Devil, you might say?"

That same thought had crossed Galtier's mind, too. He did his best to fight it down whenever it did. Now he said, "No. We are a small man. The United States, they are a large, strong man who carries a gun. Are we foolish because we do not go out of our way to step on his toes? I think not."

"Maybe," his son said, more reluctantly still. Then he asked, "What time is it?"

"Am I a clock?" Galtier said. "You can look at one as easily as I."

Georges did, and then exclaimed in dismay. "Is it half past four already? Tabernac! I thought it was earlier."

"And why does the hour matter so much?" Galtier inquired with a certain ironic curiosity, part of which was about whether his guess was right.

Sure enough, his younger son shuffled his feet a couple of times before answering, "When I was in town, I heard there would be a dance tonight. I thought I might go."

"Did you?"

"Yes, I did." Georges attempted defiance. He didn't do a good job of it. His older brother, Charles, or any of his four sisters could have given him lessons.

Lucien and Marie shared amused looks. They'd met at a dance, somewhere a little more than thirty years before. Nor were they the only couple in the neighborhood who had-far from it. Galtier said, "All right, son. Have a good time."

Georges started to argue, to protest. Then he really heard what his father had said. He blinked. "It's all right?" he asked suspiciously.

"I said so, didn't I?"

Marie added, "There's plenty of hot water on the stove, if you have time to bathe and shave before you go."

"Merci, chere Maman. I'll do that quick as a wink." Georges still looked as if he didn't trust his ears. He went off to the kitchen to take the hot water to the bathroom, still scratching his head.

When he was, or at least might have been, out of earshot, Marie said, "High time he got married. I began to worry about Charles when he waited so long."

"Madeleine Boileau is a nice girl, and she made him a good match this past winter," Galtier said. His wife nodded. He went on, "She is a better match than we could have got without our American doctor son-in-law, or without the money from the Americans for the property on which the hospital stands."

"I know that," Marie said. "You must know it, too. Why bring it up now? We've had these things for some time."

"Why bring it up now?" Galtier echoed. "To convince myself what we've done is worthwhile, that's why. Because there are times when I feel our money is like Judas' thirty pieces of silver, that's why. Because I almost envy the Canadians for rising, that's why."

Marie eyed him. "Would you disown your grandson?"

"No. Never." Lucien didn't hesitate. He did laugh. "All right. You have me."

"I should hope so," Marie said.