The Center Cannot Hold

IV

Another trip down to Washington. Flora Blackford preferred Philadelphia, and didn't care who knew it. But she was willing to excuse the trip to the formal capital of the USA for one reason: so her husband could for the second time take the oath of office as vice president of the United States.

"Now we think about 1928," she told him as the Pullman car rattled south from Philadelphia. Then she shook her head. "No. That's not right. We should have been thinking about 1928 since the minute we won last November."

Hosea Blackford's smile showed amusement-and, she was glad to see, ambition, too. "I don't know about you, Flora," he said, "but I have been thinking about it since the minute we won last November, and a while before that, too. When I first saw what the office was, I didn't think I could do much with it or go any further. I've changed my mind, though."

"Good," Flora said. "You should have, and you'd better think about it. You can be president of the United States. You really can."

"That wouldn't be too bad for a boy off a Dakota farm, would it?" he said. "You always hear talk about such things. 'Any mother's son can grow up to be president.' That's what people say. Having the chance to make it come true, though…"

"Of course, if you thought being president was the most important thing in the world, you never should have married me." Flora tried to keep her tone light. Other people would be saying the same thing much more pointedly in the years to come. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. A presidential candidate with a Jew for a wife? Unheard of! How many votes would it cost him?

"That has occurred to me," Hosea Blackford said slowly. "It couldn't very well not have occurred to me. But then I decided that, if I had to choose between the two, I would rather spend the rest of my life with you than be president. So I'll take my chances, and the country can take its."

Flora stared at him. Then she kissed him. One thing led to another. The run from Philadelphia down to Washington wasn't a very long one, especially not when traveling on President Sinclair's express. They barely had time to get dressed again and set their clothes to rights before the train came in to Union Station.

"It's a good thing you don't have to wrestle with a corset, the way you would have before the war," Hosea said, adjusting his necktie in the mirror.

"Don't speak of such things-you don't know what you're talking about," Flora answered. "The only thing I can think of is, whoever put women in corsets must have hated us. Especially in summertime. A corset on a hot summer day…" She shuddered.

"Well, you wouldn't have had to worry about the heat today." Her husband looked out the window. "The snow's still coming down."

"March is late in the year for a snowstorm," Flora said. "I wonder if what people say is true: that the weather's been peculiar since the Great War, and that it made the weather peculiar."

Hosea Blackford laughed. "Back in Dakota, I would have said May was late for a snowstorm, but nothing sooner than that. If you ask me, the weather's always peculiar. I have a suspicion it's peculiar because it's peculiar, too, and not because we made it that way. I can't prove that, but it's what I think. The weather's bigger than anything we can do, even the Great War."

"I hope you're right," she said.

On the platform, a military band blared away. Flora didn't care for that. It wasn't a proper Socialist symbol, even if it was a symbol of the presidency. But if President Sinclair wanted it-and he did-she could hardly complain. People called her the conscience of the Congress, but this wasn't a question of conscience-only one of taste.

A limousine whisked the president and his wife to the White House. Another one brought the Blackfords there. The journey took only a few minutes. When Flora saw the Washington Monument, she pointed. "It's taller than it was when we came down here for Roosevelt's funeral. You can really tell."

Her husband nodded. "Before President Sinclair's term is up, it'll be back to its full height. No mark on the sides to show how much of it the Confederates knocked down, either. I think that's good."

"So do I," Flora agreed. "No matter what the Democrats say, there can be such a thing as too much remembrance."

"Yes." Hosea sighed. "Some people just can't see that. Why anyone would want to remember all the horror we went through during the Great War… Well, it's beyond me."

"Beyond me, too," Flora said. "Try not to get into an argument with my brother tomorrow."

"I won't argue if David doesn't," her husband said. "I'll try not to argue even if he does." David Hamburger had lost a leg in the last year of the war. In spite of that-or maybe because of it-he'd gone from Socialist to conservative Democrat since. Having paid so much, he couldn't, wouldn't, believe that payment hadn't been worthwhile.

During President Sinclair's-and Vice President Blackford's-first inauguration, Flora had been a Congresswoman, yes. But she hadn't been Blackford's wife, and hadn't been fully swept up into the social whirl surrounding the occasion. Now she went from one reception to another. She found it more wearing than enjoyable.

When she said as much, Hosea Blackford laughed. "Are you sure you're a New York Jew, and not one of those gloomy Protestants from New England? No matter what they say, there's nothing in the Bible against having a good time."

"I didn't say there was," Flora answered. "But it all seems so-excessive."

"Oh, is that all you're worrying about?" Hosea laughed again. "Of course it's excessive. That's the point of it."

She gave him a disapproving look. "I'm sure Louis XVI said the same thing just before the French Revolution."

"Not fair," Hosea said.

"Maybe not." Flora didn't want to argue with her husband, any more than she wanted him quarreling with her brother. But she wasn't altogether convinced, either.

She found believing him easier when Inauguration Day came. When the Socialists won the election in 1920, electricity had filled the air. The Democrats had dominated U.S. politics since the election of 1884. Some people had feared proletarian revolution. Some had looked for it.

It hadn't come. Politics had gone on as usual-the same song, but in a different key. Flora supposed that was a good thing. She still sometimes had a sense of opportunity missed, though.

This second Socialist inauguration seemed different. Now no one acted astonished the day had ever come. People took it for granted, in fact. Flora didn't know whether that was good or bad, either. She did know that, up on the reviewing stand in front of the White House, she wondered if she'd freeze to death before her husband and President Sinclair took the oaths of office for their second terms.

But having her family up on the stand with her made up for a lot. Her older sister Sophie's son Yossel was very big now-he was almost ten. He'd never seen his father, who'd been killed in action before he was born. Flora had hardly seen her younger sister Esther's new husband, a clerk named Meyer Katz. She was also startled at how gray her parents were getting.

She wished her brother David hadn't worn his Soldiers' Circle pin, with a sword through the year of his conscription class. Only reactionaries did. But he wore his Purple Heart next to it. That and the stick he used and the slow, rolling gait of a man who made do with an artificial leg after an above-the-knee amputation meant no one near him said a word about it. His younger brother, Isaac, had gone through his turn in the Army after the Great War. His tour had been quiet, uneventful. He didn't wear a pin on his lapel.

In President Sinclair's second inaugural address, he talked about justice for the working man, old-age pensions, and "getting along with our neighbors on this great continent." The first two drew fierce applause from the crowd, the third rather less.

"Memories of the war are still too fresh," Hosea Blackford said when all the speeches and parades were over. "In another ten years, people will look more kindly on the Confederate States."

"Not everyone will," David Hamburger said. He was only a tailor talking to the vice president of the United States, but he spoke his mind.

His brother-in-law frowned. They were going to argue after all. "Would you want your children to go through what you did? Do you think the Confederates are mad enough to want their children to go through it again?"

"I hope there's never a war again," Flora said.

"I hope the same thing," David answered. "But hoping there won't be and staying ready in case there is are two different animals."

"We'd do better if we'd made a just peace, not the harsh one Teddy Roosevelt forced the CSA to swallow," Hosea Blackford said. "And we're still trying to figure out what to do with Canada."

"You try giving away anything Roosevelt won and you'll lose the next election quicker than you ever thought you could," David said.

"I don't think so," Flora said. "If we aren't a just nation, what are we?"

"A strong one, I hope," her brother answered. They eyed each other. They both used English, but they didn't speak the same language.

No one questioned the Socialist Party's agenda at any of the inaugural banquets and balls that night. Even the Democratic Congressmen and Senators who made their appearance were smiling and polite. They wouldn't show their teeth till Congress went back into session up in Philadelphia.

Flora was just as well pleased to return to the de facto capital. Over the past eight years, it had become home to her. Her husband teased her as the train pulled into Broad Street Station: "You'll be busier than I will. The vice president's main job is growing moss on his north side."

"You knew that when you accepted the nomination the first time," Flora said.

He nodded. "Well, yes. Even so, these past four years have really rammed it home."

But Flora had trouble charging into the new session as she was used to doing. She found herself sleepy all the time, without the energy she usually took for granted. Before long, she was pretty sure she knew why. When she no longer had room for doubt, she said, "Hosea, I'm going to have a baby."

His eyes grew very wide. After a moment, he started to laugh. "So much for prophylactics!" he blurted. Then he gave her a kiss and said, "That's wonderful news!"

Flora wished he'd said that before the other. "I think so, too," she said. "The world he'll see…"

"I know. That's astonishing to think about." Hosea Blackford ran a hand through his hair. It was thick, but gray. "I only hope I'll see enough of it with him for him to remember me. This is one of those times that reminds me I'm not so young as I wish I were."

"You're not too old," Flora said slyly. Her husband laughed again. Even so, the moment didn't quite turn out the way she wished it would have.

T he McGregors' wagon plodded toward Rosenfeld. The horse's tail switched back and forth, back and forth, flicking at the flies that came to life in the springtime. Mary McGregor felt like a turtle poking its head out of its shell. All through the harsh Manitoba winter, she'd stayed on the farm. Going into town then wasn't for the fainthearted. Her mother had done it, for kerosene and other things they couldn't make for themselves, but she hadn't wanted to take Mary or Julia along.

A Ford whizzed past them. The horse snorted at the dust the motorcar kicked up. Mary coughed, too. "Those things are ugly and noisy," she said. This one had been particularly ugly-it was painted barn red, so anyone could see it coming, or going, for miles.

"They go so fast, though," Julia said wistfully. "You can get from here to there in nothing flat. And more and more people have 'em nowadays."

"People who suck up to the Yankees," Mary said.

Her older sister shook her head. "Not all of them. Not any more."

From the seat in front of them, their mother looked back over her shoulder. "We're not getting one any time soon," Maude McGregor said, and brushed a wisp of hair back from her face. Her voice was harsh and flat, as it so often was these days. "Hasn't got anything to do with politics, either. They're expensive, is what they are."

That silenced both Mary and Julia. The farm kept them all fed, but it could do no more than that-or rather, they could make it do no more than that. If Pa were alive, and Alexander, we'd be fine, Mary thought. But there was always too much work and not enough time. She didn't know what to do about that. She didn't think anybody could do anything about it.

"We ought to be coming up to the checkpoint outside of town pretty soon," Julia said.

"We've passed it by now," Maude McGregor said, even more flatly than before. "It's not up any more."

Mary felt like bursting into tears. Two or three years before, she would have. Now she faced life with a thoroughly adult bleakness. "The rebellion's all over, then," she said, and nothing more lived in her voice than had in her mother's.

"It never had a chance," Julia said.

That was enough to rouse Mary, whose red hair did advertise her temper. "It would have," she said, "if so many people hadn't sat on their hands. And if there hadn't been so many traitors."

For some little while, the clopping of the horse's hooves, the squeak of an axle that was getting on toward needing grease, and the occasional clank as an iron tire ran over a rock in the roadway were the only sounds. "Traitors" is an ugly word, Mary thought. But it was the only one that fit. The Americans had known the uprising was coming before it really got started. The Rosenfeld Register — the weekly newspaper-had even said a Canadian woman with a name famous for patriotism helped with information about it because she was in love with a Yank. The only famous woman patriot Mary could think of offhand was Laura Secord. Did she have descendants? Mary wouldn't have been surprised. She didn't think the uprising would have had much of a chance anyhow. With such handicaps, it had had none. All that was left now was punishing those who'd done their best for their country.

Maude McGregor drove around a muddy crater in the road. This one was new; it didn't date back to the days of the Great War. Mary hoped it had blown up something large and American.

Before long, Julia pointed ahead and said, "There it is! I see it."

Mary McGregor saw Rosenfeld, too. Like her sister, she couldn't help getting excited. Rosenfeld had perhaps a thousand souls. If two railroads hadn't come together there, the town would have had no reason for existing. But there it was. It boasted a post office, a general store, the weekly newspaper, a doctor's office, and an allegedly painless dentist. He'd filled a couple of Mary's teeth. It hadn't hurt him a bit. She wished she could say the same.

"I suppose Winnipeg's bigger," Mary said, "but it can't be much bigger."

"I wouldn't think so," Julia agreed. Neither of them had ever seen a town bigger than Rosenfeld. Up in front of them, Maude McGregor chuckled quietly. Mary wondered why.

Regardless of whether there were towns bigger than Rosenfeld, it was quite crowded and bustling enough. Wagons and motorcars clogged its main street. Locals in city clothes-white shirts, neckties, jackets with lapels-and U.S. Army men in green-gray shared the sidewalk. Women wore city clothes, too. Julia pointed again. "Will you look at that?" she said, deliciously scandalized. Mary looked-and gaped.

"Disgraceful," her mother said grimly. Maude McGregor's skirt came down to her ankle, as her skirts had done for as long as Mary could remember. But this woman showed off half her legs, or so it seemed.

"If it's the style, Ma-" Julia began, her voice hesitant.

"No." Her mother hesitated not at all. "I don't care what the style is. No decent woman would wear anything like that. No daughter of mine will." Several women in Rosenfeld wore dresses and skirts that short. Were they all scarlet? Mary didn't know, but she wouldn't have been surprised.

Her mother had to pull off the main street to find a place to hitch the wagon. As Maude McGregor got down to give the horse the feed bag, Mary pointed to a signboard plastered to a wall. "Ma, what's a Bijou?" She knew she was probably mispronouncing the unfamiliar word.

"It's a motion-picture house," her mother answered after reading some of the small print under the big name.

"A motion-picture house? In Rosenfeld?" Mary and Julia exclaimed together. Julia went on, "This is the big city," while Mary asked, "Can we go see something, Ma? Can we, please?" She knew she sounded like a wheedling little girl, but she couldn't help it.

"I don't know." Here her mother wavered, where she'd been very sure about skirts. "The flyer says it costs a quarter each to get in, and seventy-five cents is a lot of money."

"We'd only do it once, Ma. It's not like we come here every day," Mary said, wheedling harder than ever.

Julia added, "It's a new business in town. It's not like those start up every day, either."

"Well-all right," Maude McGregor said. Mary clapped her hands. "But only this once, understand? You pester me about it every time we come to town and you'll find out your backsides aren't too big to switch."

"We promise, Ma," Mary and Julia chorused. They looked at each other and winked. They'd won! That didn't happen very often.

A line snaked toward the Bijou's box office. A lot of the people in the line were American soldiers. Mary ignored them. The soldiers ignored her, too, though they plainly noticed her older sister and her mother. Julia and Maude McGregor paid no attention to the men in green-gray.

Three quarters slapped down on the counter. Mary heard her mother sigh. The fellow behind the counter peeled three tickets off an enormous roll and handed them to her mother. Another young man at the door importantly tore the tickets in two. Inside the theater, the smell of buttered popcorn almost drove Mary mad. Along with the popcorn, the girl behind the counter sold lemonade and more different kinds of candy than Henry Gibbon carried in his general store.

Maude McGregor led Mary and Julia past such temptations and into the theater itself. Both her daughters let out pitiful, piteous sighs. She took no notice of them. She was made of stern stuff.

The maroon velvet chairs inside the theater swung down when you put your weight on them. That proved entertaining enough to take Mary's mind off candy, at least for a little while. A couple of rows in front of her, a little boy bounced up and down, up and down, up and down. She wanted to spank him. Before too long, his father did.

Without warning, the lights went dim. A man at a piano-a man Mary hadn't noticed up till then-began to play melodramatic music. The curtains slid back from an enormous screen. Some sort of machine behind her began making noise: the projector. Then the screen filled with light, and she forgot everything else.

"It's… photographs come to life," she whispered to Julia. Her sister nodded, but never took her eyes away from the screen. Mary didn't, either. Those enormous, moving black-and-white people up there held her mesmerized.

NEWS OF THE WORLD, a headline read, briefly interrupting the motion. Then she saw a man in a silly uniform and an even sillier hat waving to soldiers marching past. KAISER WILHELM REVIEWS TROOPS RETURNING FROM OCCUPIED PARTS OF FRANCE, another headline explained.

Swarthy men, many of them wearing big black mustaches, fired rifles and machine guns at one another in a country that looked dry and hot. SCENES FROM THE CIVIL WAR IN THE EMPIRE OF MEXICO, the caption said. Mary stared, entranced. She'd never been farther from the farm than Rosenfeld, but here was the whole world in front of her eyes.

Two men in suits crossed a bridge from opposite sides and shook hands. That was labeled, PRESIDENT OF USA, PREMIER OF QUEBEC MEET IN FRIENDSHIP. All of a sudden, Mary wasn't so sure she wanted the whole world in front of her eyes.

And then she saw ruined city blocks, explosions, diving aeroplanes with machine guns blazing, glum survivors, grim prisoners with hands in the air, overturned motorcars and dead bodies lying in the street, and other bodies swinging from a gallows. SCENES FROM THE REBELLION IN CANADA, the explanatory sign said. She hadn't seen much war. It had swept through Rosenfeld and stayed to the north. And she'd only been a little girl then. She gulped. This was what she wanted, was it?

Not even the main feature, a melodrama with a car chase, a chase through and on top of the cars of a train, and an astonishingly handsome leading man who wed the astonishingly beautiful leading lady and gave her a tender kiss just before the lights came back up, could take all those images of devastation out of her mind.

"That's what they're doing to our country," she said as she and her mother and sister filed out of the theater. "They want us to know it, too."

"They want us to be afraid," Julia said.

"They know how to get what they want, too," Maude McGregor said grimly. "Come on. Let's buy what we need and get back to the farm."

They were on their way to Henry Gibbon's general store when Mary saw a SCENE FROM THE REBELLION IN CANADA that wasn't what the Americans who'd made and approved the moving picture had in mind. Through the streets of Rosenfeld came a column of prisoners, on their way to the train station from God only knew where. They were scrawny and hollow-eyed and wore only rags. They must have been some of the last men captured, for most of the rebels had given up weeks, even a couple of months, before. The McGregors bathed once a week or so, like most farm families; Mary was used to strong odors. The stench that came from the prisoners made her stomach want to turn over.

One of the men started to sing "God Save the King." An American guard in green-gray hit him in the head with a rifle butt. Blood streamed down his face. The guard laughed. The prisoner stumbled on. Tears stung Mary's eyes. She didn't let them fall. She kept her face still and vowed… remembrance.

A bner Dowling looked down at what had been a plate of ham and fried potatoes. "By God, that was good," he said.

"Yes, sir," said his adjutant, a dapper young captain named Angelo Toricelli. He had only about half of Dowling's girth, but he'd worked similar execution on a beefsteak and a couple of baked spuds.

"Nothing wrong with the way the Mormons cook," Dowling said, blotting his lips on his napkin.

"No, sir," Captain Toricelli agreed.

Having spent a lot of time as an adjutant, Dowling recognized the younger man's resigned tone, though he was resolved not to do so much to deserve resigned agreement as his own cross, General Custer, had done. Thinking of a cross made him suspect he knew what was bothering Toricelli. "Does it bother you that I eat so much, Captain?"

One of Toricelli's eyebrows twitched in surprise. "Not… really, sir," he said after a moment. "It's none of my business. I would never ask anyone to be anything he's not."

"Interesting way to put it," Dowling remarked. Then he laughed, which set several of his chins jiggling. Laugh or not, though, he changed the subject: "How do you like being a gentile in Utah? Me, I think it's pretty funny."

"The Mormons can say we're gentiles," Toricelli answered. "You can go around saying all sorts of things. That doesn't mean they're true."

"I suppose not." Dowling left a silver dollar on the table to cover their meals. He got to his feet. So did Toricelli, who hurried to open the restaurant's front door for him. That was one of the things adjutants were for, as Dowling knew only too well.

"Pretty day," Toricelli remarked as they came out onto the street.

"It is, isn't it?" Dowling said. Spring was in the air. Snow had retreated up the slopes of the Wasatch Mountains to the east. Sea gulls wheeled overhead, which Dowling never failed to find strange so far inland. And, as always, sounds of building filled the air.

Salt Lake City had surrendered to U.S. forces nine years before. Dowling had seen photographs of it just after the Mormon rebels finally yielded to superior force. They'd fought till they couldn't fight any more. The city had looked more like the mountains of the moon than anything that sprang from human hands and minds. Hardly one stone remained atop another. The Mormons had simmered resentfully under the harsh treatment they'd got from U.S. authorities ever since the Second Mexican War. When they rose during the Great War, they'd done a lot more than simmer.

Now… Now, on the outside, everything here seemed calm. Salt Lake City-and Provo to the south and Ogden to the north-were three of the newest, shiniest towns in the USA. Most of the rubble had been cleared away. Most of the Mormons who'd survived the uprising were getting on with their lives. On the surface, Utah seemed much like any other state. When Dowling's train first brought him to Salt Lake City, he'd wondered if his presence, if the U.S. Army's presence, was necessary.

He'd been here more than a year now. He no longer wondered. As he and Toricelli walked east along South Temple Street towards Army headquarters, no fewer than three people-two men and a woman-shouted "Murderer!" at them: one from a second-story window, one from behind them, and one from a passing Ford.

Toricelli eyed the motorcar as it sped away, then muttered something pungent that might not have been English under his breath. "I wasn't able to read the license plate," he said. "If I had, we could have tracked that son of a bitch down."

"What difference does it make?" Dowling said. "They all feel that way about us. One more, one less-so what?"

"It makes a lot of difference, sir," his adjutant said earnestly. "Yes, they're going to hate us, but they need to fear us, too. Otherwise, they start up again, and we did all that for nothing." To show what he meant by that, he waved across South Temple Street to Temple Square.

No rebuilding there. By order of the military administration, the Mormon Tabernacle and the Temple and the other great buildings of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints remained as they had fallen during the Federal conquest of Salt Lake City: another reminder to the locals of the cost of rising against the United States. Rattlesnakes dwelt among the tumbled stones. They were the least the occupiers had to worry about.

Colonel Dowling murmured a few lines from Shelley:

" 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Angelo Toricelli gave him a quizzical look. "I've heard other officers recite that poem, sir."

"Have you? Well, I'm not surprised," Dowling said. Even fallen, the gray granite Temple inspired awe. A gilded copper statue of the angel Moroni had topped the tallest spire, which the Mormons had used as an observation post till U.S. artillery knocked it down. No American soldiers had ever found a trace of that statue. Persistent rumor said the Mormons had spirited away its wreckage and venerated it as a holy relic, as the Crusaders had venerated pieces of the True Cross. Dowling didn't know about that. He did know there was an enormous reward for information leading to the capture of the statue, or of any significant part of it. No one had ever collected. No one had ever tried to collect.

At the corner of Temple and Main, Captain Toricelli said, "You want to be careful crossing, sir. For some reason or other, Mormons in motorcars have a devil of a time seeing soldiers."

"Yes, I've noticed that," Dowling agreed. His hand fell to the grip of the. 45 on his hip. Most places, an officer's pistol was a formality almost as archaic as a sword. Even more than in occupied Canada, Dowling felt the need for a weapon here.

Soldiers in machine-gun emplacements protected by reinforced concrete and barbed wire surrounded U.S. Army headquarters in Salt Lake City. Sentries carefully checked Dowling and Toricelli's identification cards. They'd discovered the unfortunate consequences of not checking such things. The Mormons had Army uniforms they'd taken during the Great War, and some of them would kill even at the cost of their own lives. Not much news of such assassinations had got out of Utah, but that made them no less real.

"Oh-Colonel Dowling," a soldier said as Dowling walked down the hall to his office. "General Pershing is looking for you, sir."

"Is he? Well, he's just about to find me, then." Dowling turned to his adjutant. "I'll see you in a while, Captain."

"Of course, sir," Angelo Toricelli said. "I have a couple of reports to keep me busy."

"If you can't stay busy in Utah, something's wrong with you," Dowling agreed. And off he went to see the commanding general.

John J. Pershing was in his mid-sixties. He didn't look younger than his years so much as tough and well-preserved for them. His jaw jutted. His gray Kaiser Bill mustache-the style was now falling out of favor with younger men-added to his bulldog appearance. His icy blue eyes seized and held Dowling. "Hello, Colonel. Take a seat. There's coffee in the pot, if you care for some."

"No, thank you, sir. I'm just back from lunch," Dowling answered.

General Custer would have been even money or better to make some snide crack about his weight. Pershing simply nodded and got down to business: "I'm worried, Colonel Dowling. This place is like a powder keg, and I'm afraid the fuse is lit."

"Really, sir?" Dowling said in surprise. "I know Utah's been a powder keg for more than forty years, but why do you think it'll go off now? If the Mormons were going to rise against us, wouldn't they have tried it when the Canucks did?"

"Strategically, that makes good sense," Pershing agreed. "But the trouble that may come here hasn't got anything to do with what happened up in Canada. You are of course aware how we hold this state?"

"Yes, sir: by the railroads, and by the fertile belt from Provo up to Ogden," Dowling answered. "Past that, there's a lot of land and not a lot of people, so we don't worry very much."

"Exactly." Pershing nodded. "We just send patrols through the desert now and again to make sure people aren't plotting too openly." He sighed. "Out in the desert, maybe a hundred and seventy-five miles south of here, there's a little no-account village called Teasdale. A troop of cavalry rode through it a couple of weeks ago. The captain in command discovered several families that were pretty obviously polygamous."

"Uh-oh," Dowling said.

"I couldn't have put it better myself," Pershing replied.

Polygamy had been formally illegal in Utah since the Army occupation during the Second Mexican War. It hadn't disappeared, though. Dowling wished it had, because, more than anything else, it got people exercised. Fearing he already knew the answer, he asked, "What did the cavalry captain do, sir?"

"He applied the law," Pershing said. "He arrested everyone he could catch, and he burned the offending houses to the ground."

"And he came out of this place alive? I'm impressed."

"Teasdale's a very small town-smaller still, after he seized the polygamists," Pershing replied. "And he is an able young man. Or he would be, if he had any sense to go with his tactical expertise. Naturally, even though this happened in the middle of nowhere, news got out right away. And, just as naturally, even a lot of Mormons who aren't ardent polygamists are up in arms about it."

"Not literally, I hope," Dowling said.

"So do I, Colonel. But we must be ready, just in case," Pershing said. "I've asked Philadelphia to send us some barrels to use against them at need. If the War Department decides to do it instead of reprimanding me for asking for something that costs money, I'm going to put you in charge of them. You became something of an expert on barrels, didn't you, serving under General Custer and with Colonel Morrell during the war?"

I became an expert on not getting myself court-martialed on account of barrels, is what I became, Dowling thought. Custer wanted to use them against War Department doctrine, and I had to cover for him. Does that make me an expert? Aloud, he answered, "I'll do whatever I can, sir."

"I'm sure of it," Pershing said. "This may all turn out to be so much moonshine, you understand. The War Department may need a real rising from the Mormons before they send in the weapons that would have overawed them and stopped the rising in its tracks. And the powers that be may not send us anything even in case of rebellion. They're in a cheese-paring mood back there, sure enough. They've stopped spending any money on improving barrels, you know."

"Yes, I do know that," Dowling replied. "I don't like it."

"Who would, with a brain in his head?" Pershing said. "But soldiers don't make policy. We only carry it out, and get blamed when it goes wrong. I wonder how fast and how well the Confederate States are rearming."

"They aren't supposed to be doing anything of the sort, sir," Dowling said.

Pershing tossed his head, like a horse bedeviled by flies. "I know that, Colonel. I wonder anyway."

A bullet cracked past Jefferson Pinkard's head. He ducked, not that that would do him any good if the bullet had his name on it. Somewhere not far off, rebel Mexican machine gunners started firing at something they imagined they saw. A field gun banged away, flinging shells into the uplands town of San Luis Potosi.

Like most Confederates, Pinkard had thought of the Empire of Mexico as his country's feebleminded little brother-when he'd bothered thinking of it at all, which wasn't very often. In the comfortable days before the war, the Empire did as the Confederacy asked. The Confederates, after all, shielded Mexico from the wrath of the USA, which had hated the Empire since its creation during the War of Secession.

The truth, nowadays, was more complicated. The USA backed the rebels against the Empire. The CSA couldn't officially back Maximilian III, but Freedom Party volunteers like Pinkard numbered in the thousands-and the Freedom Party wasn't the only outfit sending volunteers south to fight the Yankees and their proxies.

That all seemed straightforward enough. What Jeff hadn't counted on was that there would have been-hell, there had been-rebels even without U.S. backing. Maximilian III would never land on anybody's list for sainthood.

Pinkard shrugged. "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch, by God," he muttered. Behind him, another field gun, this one on his side, started answering the rebels' piece. It seemed to be firing as much at random as the enemy gun.

Stupid bastards, he thought, not sure whether he meant the enemy or his own side. None of them would have lasted long during the Great War; he was sure of that. Both sides were brave enough, but neither seemed to know just what it was supposed to do. They lacked the experience C.S. and U.S. forces had so painfully accumulated.

Another machine gun started rattling. Ammunition was tight. Both sides imported most of it. That didn't keep gunners from shooting it off for the hell of it. Who was going to tell 'em they couldn't? They had the weapons, after all.

A Mexican private came up to Jeff. Like Pinkard's, his cotton uniform was dyed a particularly nasty shade of yellow-brown. It looked more like something from a dog with bad digestion than a proper butternut, but all the greasers and the Confederate volunteers wore it, so Jeff could only grouse when he got the chance. He couldn't change a thing. The Mexican said, " Buenos dias, Sergeant Jeff." It came out of his mouth sounding like Heff. "The teniente, he wants to see you."

"All right, Manuel. I'm coming." Pinkard pronounced the Spanish name Man-you-well. He took that for granted, though what the locals did to his never ceased to annoy him. He walked bent over. The Mexicans built trenches for men of their size, and he overtopped most of them by half a head. The rebel snipers weren't nearly so good as the damnyankees had been up in Texas, but he didn't want to give 'em a target. He nodded to Lieutenant Hernando Guitierrez. "What can I do for you, sir? En que puedo servirle? " Again, he made a hash of the Spanish.

It didn't matter, not here. Lieutenant Guitierrez probably spoke better English than Pinkard did. He was every bit as tall, too, though not much more than half as wide through the shoulders. By his looks, he had a lot more Spaniard and a lot less Indian in him than did most of the men he commanded. He said, "I have a job for you, Sergeant."

"That's what I'm here for," Pinkard agreed.

"Er-yes." The Mexican lieutenant drummed his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had a pretty good idea what was eating the fellow. He was only a sergeant himself (and he'd never risen higher than PFC in the C.S. Army), but he got more money every month than Guitierrez did. And, although he was only a sergeant, it wasn't always obvious that his rank was inferior to the other man's. Why else were Confederate volunteers down here, if not to show the greasers the way real soldiers did things?

"What can I do for you, Lieutenant?" Jeff asked again, not feeling like pushing things today.

Guitierrez gave him what might have been a grateful look. "You are familiar, Sergeant, with the machines called barrels?"

"Uh… yeah." Pinkard was familiar enough to start worrying, even though the clanking monsters had been few and far between in Texas during the Great War-especially on the Confederate side. "What's the matter? The rebels going to start throwing 'em at us? That's real bad news, if they are."

"No, no, no." The Mexican officer shook his head. He had a sort of melancholy pride different from anything Pinkard had known in his own countrymen. " We have three, built in Tampico by the sea and coming up here to the highlands by railroad. I want you to lead the infantry when we move forward with them against the peasant rabble who dare to oppose Emperor Maximilian."

" You people built barrels?" Once he'd said it, Jeff wished he hadn't sounded quite so astonished. But that was too late, of course.

Lieutenant Guitierrez's lips thinned. "Yes, we did." But then he coughed. He was a proud man, but also an honest man. "I understand the design may have come from the Confederate States-unofficially, of course."

"Ah. I get you." Jeff laid a finger by the side of his nose and winked. The Confederates couldn't build barrels on their own. The Yankees would land on them with both feet if they tried. But what happened south of the border was a different story. "When does the attack go in, and what are we aiming for?"

"We want to drive them from those little hills where they can observe our movements. They are shelling San Luis Potosi from that forward position, too," Guitierrez replied. "If all goes well, this will be a heavy blow against them. As for when, the attack begins the morning after the barrels come into place."

He didn't say when that morning would be. He was probably wise not to. For one thing, Pinkard had already discovered what manana meant. For another, barrels, no matter who built them, broke down if you looked at them sideways. Pinkard grunted. "All right, Lieutenant. Soon as they get here, I'll lead your infantry against the rebels. You'll follow along yourself to see how it's done, right?"

He wasn't calling Guitierrez a coward. He'd seen the other man had courage and to spare. And Guitierrez nodded now. " Claro que si, Sergeant. Of course. That is why you are here: to show us how it is done."

Jeff grunted again. In one sense, the Mexican lieutenant was right. In another… Pinkard was here because his marriage was as much a casualty of the Great War as a fellow with a hook for a hand. He was here because he had a fierce, restless energy and an urgent desire to kill something, almost anything. He couldn't satisfy that desire back in Birmingham, not unless he wanted to fry in the electric chair shortly thereafter.

Three days later-not a bad case of manana, all things considered-the barrels came into position, clanking and rattling and belching and farting every inch of the way. Pinkard wasn't surprised to find more than half their crewmen were Confederate volunteers. He was surprised when he got a look at the barrels themselves. They weren't the rhomboids with tracks all around that the CSA, following the British lead, had used during the Great War. And they weren't quite the squat, hulking monsters with a cannon in the nose and machine guns bristling on flanks and rear the USA had thrown at the Confederacy.

They did have a conning tower like that of a U.S. barrel-their crewmen called it a turret. It revolved through some sort of gear mechanism, and carried a cannon and a machine gun mounted alongside it. Two more bow-mounted machine guns completed their armament. "Since the turret spins, we don't need nothin' else," a crewman said. "Means we don't have to try and shoehorn so many men inside, neither."

"Sounds like somebody's been doing a lot of thinking about this business," Pinkard said.

"Reckon so," the other man agreed. "Now if the same somebody would've thunk about the engine, too, we'd all be better off. A good horse can still outrun these miserable iron sons of bitches without breathing hard."

During the Great War-even the attenuated version of it fought out in Texas-a big artillery barrage would have preceded the barrels' advance. Neither side in this fight had enough artillery to lay down a big barrage. It didn't seem to matter. The barrels rolled forward, crushing the enemy's barbed wire and shooting up his machine-gun nests. "Come on!" Pinkard shouted to the foot soldiers loyal to Maximilian III. "Keep up with 'em! They make the hole, an' we go through it. Stick tight, and the enemy'll shoot at the barrels and not at you so much."

That was how things had worked during the Great War. In English and horrible Spanish, Jeff urged his men forward. Forward they went, too. The only thing he hadn't counted on was the effect barrels, even a ragged handful of barrels, had on troops who'd never faced them before. The rebels, or the braver men among them, tried shooting at the great machines. When their rifle and machine-gun bullets bounced off the barrels' armor, they seemed to decide the end of the world was at hand. Some ran away. The barrels' machine guns scythed them down like wheat at harvest time. Others threw down their rifles, threw up their hands, and surrendered. "Amigo!" they shouted hopefully.

Jefferson Pinkard had never had so many strangers call him friend in all his born days. In Texas, the Confederates had gone raiding to catch a handful of Yankee prisoners. Here, prisoners were coming out of his ears. "What do we do with 'em, Sergeant?" asked a soldier who spoke English-maybe he'd worked in the CSA once upon a time. "We go-?" The gesture he made wasn't the throat-cutting one Pinkard would have used, but it meant the same thing.

For once, Jeff's blood lust was sated. Slaughter in the heat of battle was as fine as taking a woman, maybe finer. Killing prisoners felt like murder. Maybe I'm still a Christian, after all. "Nah, they've surrendered," he answered. "We'll take 'em back with us. We'd better. Till those barrels break down, they're gonna keep bringin' in plenty more."

"Si, es verdad," the soldier said, and translated Pinkard's words for the other Mexicans. They all assumed he knew how to handle a flood of prisoners of war, too-including the prisoners themselves, who swarmed up to him to kiss his hands and even try to kiss his cheeks in gratitude for being spared.

"Cut that out!" he roared. It made him wish he had ordered a massacre. Instead, he led the captured rebels-who were even more ragged and sorry-looking than the Mexican imperialists-back out of the fighting. Once he got them behind the line, he had to figure out what to do with them next. Nobody else seemed to want to do anything that looked like thinking.

He commandeered some barbed wire and some posts to string it from. After he herded the prisoners into the big square he'd made, he told off guards to make sure they didn't head for the high country. Then he had to yell to make sure they got something-not much, but something-to eat and drink. And he had to go on yelling, to make sure manana didn't foul things up. By the time three or four days went by, all the Mexicans assumed he was in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp. Before very much longer, he started thinking the same thing himself.

C olonel Irving Morrell hated soldiering from behind a desk. He always had. As best he could tell, he always would. And he especially hated it when there was fighting going on and he found himself a thousand miles away. The reports filtering north from the civil war in the Empire of Mexico struck him as particularly maddening-and all the more so because he couldn't get anybody else in the War Department to take them seriously.

"God damn it, the imperialists are cleaning up with these new barrels of theirs," he raged to his superior, a stolid senior colonel named Virgil Donaldson. He waved papers in Donaldson's face. "Has anybody besides me read this material? By what it's saying, they've got just about all the features we put on our fancy prototype at Fort Leavenworth. But we built our prototype and said to hell with it. Those bastards have got a production line going in Tampico."

Colonel Donaldson puffed on his pipe. He had a big red face and a big gray mustache. He looked more like somebody's kindly uncle than a General Staff officer. He sounded like somebody's kindly uncle, too, when he said, "Take an even strain, Colonel Morrell. You'll burst a blood vessel if you don't, and then where will you be?"

"But, sir-!" Morrell waved the papers again.

"Take an even strain," Donaldson repeated. He liked the phrase. Before Morrell could explode, Donaldson went on, "Who cares what a bunch of goddamn greasers are up to, anyway?"

"But it's not just greasers, sir," Morrell said desperately. "These barrels have Confederate mercenaries as crew. They've got to have Confederates designing them, too. And the Confederate States aren't allowed to build barrels. The armistice agreement makes that as plain as the nose on my face."

A ceiling fan spun lazily. A fly buzzed. Outside Donaldson's window, summer heat made the air shimmer. The government building across the street from General Staff headquarters might have belonged to some other world, some other universe. Morrell laughed softly. He'd had that feeling about the General Staff before, with no tricks of the eye to start it going.

Trying to come back to what he was sure was reality, he said, "We ought to protest to Richmond. The Confederate government is turning a blind eye toward what has to be several regiments' worth of their veterans going south to fight on Maximilian's side. That may not be against the letter of their agreements with us, but it's dead against the spirit."

After another puff on that pipe, Colonel Donaldson said, "Nice idea, but don't hold your breath. President Sinclair is looking for good relations with the CSA. He doesn't want to bother Richmond with trifles, and he thinks anything this side of a Confederate invasion of Kentucky is a trifle."

Morrell muttered something under his breath. It wasn't that he thought Donaldson was wrong. No, he feared his superior was right. "Why did we bother to win the war, if we won't make it count?"

"You'd have to talk to President Sinclair about that, Colonel Morrell," Donaldson answered. " Why isn't my job, or yours, either. It's for the civilians. They decide what to do, and they tell us. Doing it is our department."

"I know, sir." The lesson had been drilled into Morrell since his West Point days. During the War of Secession, U.S. generals had spoken of overthrowing the republic and becoming military dictator. Then they'd gone out and lost the war, so they'd never had the chance to do more than talk about it. No one had wanted to take the risk of such things since, though it was only now, a lifetime later, that the United States had to deal with the consequences of victory rather than defeat.

"In fairness, we could use some peace and quiet with Richmond right about now," Donaldson said. "After all, we've got Germany to worry about, too."

"Well, yes," Morrell admitted reluctantly. He knew why he was reluctant to admit any such thing, too: "But if we ever do fight the Kaiser, that'll be the Navy's worry, not the Army's. At least, I have a devil of a time seeing how the Germans could invade us, or how we could land troops in Europe."

"It wouldn't be easy, would it?" Donaldson said. "But, of course, a lot depends on who's friends with whom. The Germans have the same worries about France and England as we do about the CSA. And God only knows what's going to happen to the Russians, even now. They're having more trouble putting down their Reds than the Confederates ever did during the war."

"Not our worry, thank God." Morrell chuckled. The puff of smoke Donaldson sent up might have been a fragrant question mark. Morrell explained: "The Russian Reds make up the best names for themselves. I especially like the two who are operating in that town on the Volga-Tsaritsin, that's the name of the place. The Red general is the Man of Steel, and his second-in-command goes by the Hammer. The Reds in the CSA weren't so fancy."

"They were nothing but a bunch of coons," Donaldson said. "You can't expect much from them."

That made Morrell thoughtful. "I wonder," he said. "I do wonder, sir. When I was in the field, I ran up against Negro regiments a few times. Far as I could tell, they didn't fight any worse than raw regiments of white Confederate troops."

"Huh." The older man sounded deeply skeptical. But then he shrugged. " That's not our worry, either, thank God."

"No, sir," Morrell agreed. "Are you sure there's no point to writing that report about the barrels down in Mexico, sir? I really do think that's alarming."

Donaldson sighed the sigh of a man who'd been a cog in a bureaucratic machine for a long time. "You can write the report, Colonel, if it makes you happy. I'll even endorse it and send it on. But I can tell you what will happen. The most likely thing is, nothing. It'll go into a file here along with a million other reports. That's what happens if you're lucky."

"I don't call that luck," Morrell said.

"Compared to the other thing that could happen, it's luck," Donaldson told him. "Believe you me, it's luck. Because the other thing that could happen is, somebody reads the report and passes it on to somebody else, somebody outside the General Staff, and it gets into the hands of one of those precious civilians-say, somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war."

"But he's just the man-just the sort of man-who ought to see a report like this one," Morrell said. "He thought well of the one I did on the mess in Armenia."

"Well, maybe. But maybe not, too. Armenia's a long ways off, you see. The Confederate States are right next door," Colonel Donaldson said. "If you're lucky, he reads it and then he throws it into a file in the War Department offices. Different file, but that's all right." He held up a hand to silence Morrell, then went on, "If you're not so lucky, he reads it and he thinks, Who's this smart-aleck soldier trying to tell me how to do my job? And if that's what somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas thinks, pretty soon you're not here in Philadelphia any more. You're commanding a garrison in the middle of nowhere: Alberta or Utah or New Mexico, somewhere like that."

He spoke as if of a fate worse than death. That was probably how he saw it. That was how any soldier who was first of all a cog in a bureaucratic machine and only afterwards a fighting man would have seen it. But Morrell didn't want to be here in the first place. Getting back out into the field, even somewhere in the back of beyond, sounded pretty good to him.

Yes, it does-to you, he thought then, several beats later than he should have. What will Agnes think about it? You've got a little girl now, Morrell. Do you want to haul Mildred off to God knows where, just because you couldn't stand to keep your big mouth shut?

He muttered unhappily. Colonel Donaldson thought he was contemplating the horrors of life outside Philadelphia. "Dismissed," Donaldson said.

Unhappily, Morrell left his superior's office. Even more unhappily, he went back to his own. Where does your first loyalty lie? To your wife and daughter, or to the United States of America?

He cursed softly. But he didn't need long to make up his mind. Agnes had been a soldier's widow before she met him, dammit. She knew what the price of duty could be. If they had to go off to Lethbridge or Nehi or Flagstaff, she'd take that in stride. It might even end up better for Mildred.

Morrell nodded to himself. He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter that squatted on his desk like some heathen god. He typed with his two index fingers-a slower way of doing things than proper touch-typing, but it got the job done well enough. If the powers that be chose to ignore his report, that was their business. But he was going to make sure they saw what he saw.

He did warn his wife what he'd done, and what might happen as a result. To his relief, she only shrugged. "Philadelphia's a nice town," she said. "But I got along well enough in Leavenworth, too."

He kissed her. "I like the way you think."

"It isn't a question of thinking," Agnes said. "It's a question of doing what you have to do." Mildred Morrell didn't say anything. She just kicked her legs and grinned up at her father from her cradle, showing off her first two brand new baby teeth. Some of her babbles and gurgles had dada in them, but she didn't yet associate the sound with him.

"What will you think, if you grow up in Lethbridge or Nehi instead of Philadelphia?" Morrell asked her. Mildred only laughed. She didn't care one way or the other. "Maybe, just maybe," her father said, "I'm fixing things so you don't have to go through a war when you grow up. I hope I am, anyway."

He was eating lunch the next day when Lieutenant Colonel John Abell came up to him. Without preamble, General Liggett's adjutant said, "You do believe in cooking your own goose, don't you, Colonel?"

"Ah." Morrell smiled. "You've read it, then?"

"Yes, I've read it." The astringently intellectual General Staff officer shook his head in slow wonder. "Amazing how a man can analyze so brilliantly and be so blind to politics, all at the same time."

After another bite of meat loaf, Morrell said, "You've told me as much before. What am I being blind to today?"

"One and a half million dead men, Colonel, and I'd think even you should notice them," Lieutenant Colonel Abell answered with a certain somber relish. "One and a half million dead men, or a few more than that-all the reasons why there's no stomach in the USA for another war against the Confederate States."

Morrell winced. His smile faded. John Abell was a snob. That didn't mean he was a fool-anything but. "Don't you believe most people would rather fight a small war now if the Confederates don't back down-which I think they would-than fight a big one ten or twenty years down the road?"

"Some people would. A few people would. But most?" Abell shook his head. "No, sir. Most people don't want to fight any war at all, and they'll do almost anything to keep from fighting. Meaning no offense, sir, but I think you've just cooked your own goose."

With a shrug, Morrell said, "Well, even if I have, I won't mind getting back in the field again." Lieutenant Colonel Abell looked at him as if he'd spoken in Hindustani, or maybe Choctaw. Like Colonel Donaldson, Abell was a creature of the General Staff, and didn't care to contemplate life outside it. Morrell did, which gave him a certain moral advantage. And how much good will that do you in Lethbridge when the blizzards come? he wondered, and wished he hadn't.

T om Colleton held out a package too well wrapped for him to have done it himself. "Happy birthday, Sis!" he told Anne.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she said in fond exasperation. "You shouldn't have." She kissed him on the cheek, but at least half of her meant every word of that. The birthday in question was her thirty-ninth, and the only one she would have felt less like celebrating was her fortieth.

"Well, whether I should have or not, I damn well did," her younger brother answered. Tom still had a few years to go before facing middle age-and forty meant less to a man than it did to a woman, anyhow. From forty, a woman could see all too well the approaching end of too many things, beauty among them. From thirty-nine, too, Anne thought gloomily. But Tom was grinning at her. "Go on-open it."

"I will," she said, and she did, tearing into the wrapping paper as she would have liked to tear into Father Time. "What on earth have you got here?"

"I found it the last time I was in Columbia," he said. "There. Now you've got it. See? It's-"

"A book of photographs of Marcel Duchamp's paintings!" Anne exclaimed.

"Seeing as he exhibited at Marshlands, I thought you'd like it," her brother said. "And take a look at page one seventy-three."

"Why? What's he done there?" Anne asked suspiciously. Tom's grin only got wider and more annoying. She flipped through the book till she got to page 173. The painting, especially in a black-and-white reproduction, resembled nothing so much as an explosion in a prism factory. That didn't surprise Anne. When Duchamp displayed his Nude Descending a Staircase at Marshlands just before the Great War broke out, the work had hung upside down for several days before anyone, including the artist, noticed. But here…

Tom looked over her shoulder to make sure she'd got to the right page. "You see?" he said. "You see?" He pointed to the title below the photograph.

" 'Mademoiselle Anne Colleton of North Carolina, Confederate States of America,' " Anne read. She said something most unladylike, and then, "For God's sake, he doesn't even remember what state he was in! I'm not surprised, I suppose-all he cared about while he was here was getting drunk and laying the nigger serving girls."

"What do you think of the likeness?" her brother asked.

Before the war, Anne had been a champion of everything modern. Life was harder now. She had little time for such fripperies. And I'm older than I was then, she thought bleakly. It's harder to stay up to date, and to stay excited about being up to date.

She took a longer look at "Mlle. Anne Colleton." It still seemed made up of squares and triangles and rectangles flying in all directions. But lurking among them, cunningly hidden, were features that might have been her own. Slowly, she said, "It's not as bad as you make it out to be."

"No, it's worse," Tom said. "When I was in the trenches, I saw men who got hit by shells and didn't look this bad afterwards." He brought his experience to the abstract painting, just as Anne brought hers. That was bound to be what Marcel Duchamp had had in mind. Anne might have cared more if he hadn't made such a nuisance of himself while at Marshlands, and if he hadn't been such a coward about recrossing the Atlantic after the war began and both sides' submersibles started prowling.

As things were, she only shrugged and said, "It is a compliment of sorts. Whatever he thought of me, he didn't forget me once he got back to France."

"Nobody ever forgets you, Sis," Tom Colleton said. Then he added something he never would have dared say before the war. Going into the Army had made a man of him; he'd been a boy, a comfortable boy, till then. He asked, "How come you never married any of the fellows who sniffed around after you? There were always enough of 'em."

Had he presumed to ask such a question before the Great War, she would have slapped him down, hard. Now, though she didn't like it, she gave it a serious answer: "Some of them wanted to run me and to run my money. Nobody runs me, and I run the money better than most men could. I've said that before. And the others, the ones who didn't care so much about the money…" She laughed a hard and bitter laugh. "They were sons of bitches, just about all of them. I recognize the breed. I'd better-takes one to know one, people say."

Almost fondly, she remembered Roger Kimball. The submarine officer had been a thoroughgoing son of a bitch. He'd also been far and away the best lover she ever had. She didn't know what that said. (Actually, she did know, but she didn't care to dwell on it.) But, in the end, Kimball had chosen the Freedom Party over her. And he was dead now, shot by the widow of a U.S. seaman whose destroyer he'd sunk after the CSA had asked for and been granted an armistice.

She waited for Tom to give her a lecture. But he only asked another question: "Can you go on by yourself for the rest of your days?"

"I don't know," Anne admitted. To keep from having to think about it, she tried to change the subject: "What about you, Tom? You're as single as I am."

"Yeah, I know," he said with a calm that surprised her. "But there are a couple of differences between us. For one thing, I'm a few years younger than you are. For another, I'm starting to look hard, and you're not."

"Are you?" she said, surprised. "You didn't tell me anything about that."

Tom nodded, almost defiantly. "Well, I am, and yes, I know I haven't told you anything. No offense, Sis, but you like running people's lives so much, you don't like it when they try and run their own." That held enough truth to make Anne give him a wry nod in return. He dipped his head, acknowledging it, and continued, "There's one more thing, no offense. A lot of ways, when a man gets married matters a lot less than when a woman does."

And that was all too true, as well. In a fair, just world it wouldn't have been, but Anne had never been naive enough to imagine the world either fair or just. Looks weren't what kept a man, but they were what lured him. She'd used her own blond beauty to advantage more times than she could count. Again, turning thirty-nine reminded her she wouldn't be able to do that forever. If she wanted to have a baby or two, she wouldn't be able to do that forever, either.

She sighed. "Well, Tom, when you're right, you're right, and you're right, dammit. I'm going to have to do something about it."

Her brother blinked. He'd probably been expecting a shouting match, not agreement. "Just like that?" he asked.

Anne nodded briskly. "Yes, just like that, or as close to just like that as I can make it. Or don't you think I can do what I set my mind to doing?" If he said he didn't, he would have a shouting match on his hands.

But he only laughed. "Anybody who thinks that about you is a damn fool, Sis. Now, I may be a damn fool-plenty of people have called me one, and they've had their reasons-but I'm not that particular kind of a damn fool, thank you kindly."

Although Anne laughed, too, she also gave him another nod. "Good. You'd better not be."

She meant what she said. As if to prove it, she drove up to Columbia a couple of days later. She knew the eligible bachelors in little St. Matthews, South Carolina, much too well to have the slightest interest in marrying any of them. He was too old; he was too dull; he was too grouchy; he couldn't count to twenty-one without dropping his pants. The pickings had to be better, or at least wider, in the state capital.

They would be better still down in Charleston, but Columbia was a lot closer. That made it more convenient both for her and for the battered Ford she drove. Keeping the motorcar alive would probably let the local mechanic send his children to college, but she had to let it keep nibbling her to death a bit at a time. She couldn't afford a new one, however much she wanted one.

Before the war-that phrase again! — and even into it, she'd driven a powerful, comfortable Vauxhall, imported from England. Confederate soldiers had confiscated it at gunpoint during the Red uprising of 1915. Almost ten years ago now, she thought with slow wonder. The Ford, now, the Ford was a boneshaker that couldn't get past thirty-five miles an hour unless it went over a cliff. And it was a Yankee machine. But it was what she had, and it ran… after a fashion.

She did like driving into Columbia. The town's gracious architecture spoke of the better days of the last century. When the Negroes rebelled here, some houses, some blocks, had gone up in flames, but most of the city remained intact-and the damage, at last, was largely repaired. She couldn't imagine a conflagration big enough to destroy the whole town. Columbia was too big for such disasters.

Charleston had better hotels than Columbia, but the Essex House, only a few blocks from the green bronze dome of the State Capitol, would do. The Essex House also boasted a first-rate switchboard. She had no trouble keeping up with her investments while away from home. And she could even study day-old copies of the New Orleans Financial Mercury and three-day-old editions of the Wall Street Journal. Since she kept most of her money in U.S. rather than C.S. markets, the latter did her more good.

But here she was more interested in men who might have investments of their own than in investments themselves. Dinner at the hotel restaurant the first night she got into town made her wonder if she'd waited several years too long to make this particular hunting expedition. Before the war, she couldn't possibly have eaten without shooing away anywhere from two to half a dozen men more interested in other pleasures than in those of the table. Here, she enjoyed-or didn't so much enjoy-some very tasty fried chicken without drawing so much as a single eye.

I might as well be eating crow, she thought as she rose, unhappy, from the table.

A visit to her assemblyman the next day was no more reassuring. Edgar Stow was younger than she was. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart in his lapel; the three missing fingers on his left hand explained why. Because of those missing digits, he had what she took to be a wedding band on the surviving index finger. He was polite to Anne, but polite to Anne as if she was an influential constituent (true) rather than a good-looking woman (false?). He also seemed maddeningly unaware of what she was trying to tell him.

"Parties? Banquets?" He shook his head. "It's pretty quiet here these days, ma'am. The old-timers, the men who've held their seats since before the war, they complain all the time about how dead it is. But we get a lot more business done nowadays than they ever did."

Stow sounded pleased with himself. He had an ashtray on his desk made from the brass base of a shell casing, with a couple of dimes bent into semicircles and welded to it to hold cigarettes. He'd surely made it, or had it made, while he was in the Army. Anne wanted to pick it up and brain him with it. His blindness stung. But that ma'am hurt worse. By the way he said it, he might have been talking to his grandmother.

"So what exactly can I help you with today, ma'am?" he asked, polite, efficient-and stupid.

Anne didn't tell him. Why waste my time? she thought as she left his office. But she had to wonder if she'd already wasted too much time.