But McGregor, to his own surprise, had an answer ready: “Look at Quebec. The Frenchies there are still mad that we licked them on the Plains of Abraham a hundred and fifty years ago. As soon as the Yankees gave them their chance, they jumped on the idea of this Republic of theirs, and to the devil with whatever went before it. If somebody gives us the chance, we can do the same.”
“Who would give us a chance, with the United States smothering us the way a bad sow smothers her piglets?” Maude said.
“I don’t know,” McGregor admitted. “But the Quebecers didn’t know before the war, either. Sooner or later, something will turn up.”
“My bread!” Julia exclaimed. “I forgot the bread!” She fled back into the kitchen. The oven door clanked open. Julia let out a sigh of relief.
“It smelled fine,” Maude called after her. “I didn’t think you had anything to worry about.”
Mary looked at her mother in astonishment. “Don’t you think turning into a Yankee is something to worry about?”
“Well, yes,” Maude said, “but it isn’t something Julia can fix by taking it out of the oven on time.” Her younger daughter thought that over. At last, reluctantly, Mary nodded.
McGregor said, “Maybe they can make us stand up in front of the Stars and Stripes. Whatever they do, though, they can’t keep us from spitting on it in our hearts, and from staying loyal to the King.”
“God save the King!” Mary said, and McGregor and Maude each put a hand on her shoulder. She caught fire, as she had a way of doing. “We’ll make it our secret,” she breathed. “We’ll all make it our secret. I don’t mean all of us-I mean all of us Canadians. We’ll do what the Yanks tell us, but inside we’ll be laughing and laughing, because we’ll know what we really think.”
Arthur and Maude McGregor looked at each other over their daughter’s head. “Some of us will,” McGregor said. “Some of us will keep the secret. Some of us will want to. Some of us won’t care, though-remember how things were in your school? Some people will believe the Americans’ lies.”
“We’ll make them pay,” Mary said fiercely. Her parents looked at each other again. McGregor didn’t know how much she knew about his bombs. She did know Major Hannebrink kept coming around-and she knew her father hated him. McGregor might have taken her out of school because the teacher mouthed the Yanks’ lies, but Mary knew how to add even so.
“What happens next?” Maude asked.
McGregor blew air out through his lips, making a whuffling noise a horse might have produced. “I don’t know. I don’t know enough to know. If we can stop them in Winnipeg and keep them from getting at the new railroads farther north, the fight goes on a while longer.”
He was trying to find the bright side, and that was the most hopeful thing he could say. If the Americans kept driving, if the Canadians and the British were able to stop them no more…in that case, the fight wouldn’t go on a while longer. It would be over in a matter of weeks.
“Whatever happens, we have to go on,” he said.
“Whatever happens, we have to pay the Americans back,” Mary said. “We have to pay them back for Alexander.”
“We will,” Maude said. “I don’t know how, but we will.”
“You can count on that, Mary,” McGregor added. His daughter nodded. She had confidence in him even if he had none in himself, even if the war was as good as lost. He looked up at the ceiling. He seemed to look right through the ceiling, to look on the naked face of God. The war might be as good as lost, but all his confidence came flooding back.
As she’d done every day she could since the war began, Nellie Semphroch opened the coffeehouse for business. The morning was fine and bright. Before long, it would get impossibly hot and impossibly muggy, the way it did every summer in Washington. Nellie stood on the sidewalk, enjoying the freshness while it lasted.
She had little else to enjoy. The view was one to inspire horror, not delight, even if a robin did trill from a tree that had been broken only into table legs, not into matchsticks. Most of her own block had come through pretty well, which is to say it hadn’t been smashed flat and then burned. Even so, bullet holes pocked storefronts, shells had bitten chunks out of them, and the only glass in sight was not in the windows but drifted in the street to puncture motorcars’ inner tubes.
Off to the south, on the far side of the Potomac, artillery boomed. It was U.S. artillery, pounding the Confederates still farther south. Confederate forces had retreated out of artillery range of Washington, driven not so much by the U.S. troops who had retaken the capital as by U.S. successes off to the west, which had left the Rebels afraid of being cut off. Not having to worry about shellfire for the first time in weeks felt good, though C.S. bombers did still make nocturnal appearances overhead.
Hal Jacobs threw wide the boarded-up door across the street to show his cobbler’s shop was open, too. He waved and called, “Good morning, Nellie.”
“Good morning, Hal,” Nellie answered. She didn’t like giving Jacobs the encouragement of using his Christian name, but didn’t see she had much choice, either. As she did every morning she saw the shoemaker these days, she said, “Thank you for getting me and Edna out of that military jail.”
Jacobs waved his hands. “I have told you before, do not thank me for this. It was my duty. It was my pleasure. People saw Confederate officers in your coffeehouse-naturally they thought you were collaborating. They didn’t know you were passing what you heard on to me.”
“You could have let me rot,” Nellie said. I didn’t come across for you, so you didn’t have any reason to come across for me. That was how things worked in the world from which she’d escaped, and, for the most part, in the more decorous world she’d managed to enter, too. They didn’t seem to work that way for Hal Jacobs, which made Nellie intensely suspicious.
He waved again, this time in rejection of the idea. “You bravely served your country. How could I do such a wicked thing? If Bill Reach turns up again-no, I will say when Bill Reach turns up again-I know he would-will-feel the same.”
“That’s nice,” Nellie answered. She had to make herself not look in the direction of the wreckage where, she presumed, Bill Reach still lay. Jacobs might talk about his turning up, but she knew he wouldn’t turn up again till the Last Trump blew.
With a final wave, Jacobs went back inside and got to work. Nellie went inside, too. While she was opening up, Edna had come downstairs. Her daughter’s face bore a look of sullen discontent, as it often did lately. “Jesus, this town is dead nowadays,” Edna complained. “We did a hell of a lot better when the Rebs were running things.”
“We wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for the help we got from Mr. Jacobs and the rest of the people who worked for the United States,” Nellie said.
Edna’s discontented look went from sullen to angry. “And you never told me about it, not a word,” she said shrilly. “I even said that crazy Bill Reach was a spy, and you went, ‘Pooh-pooh! The very idea!’ You would have let me marry Nick and then taken my pillow talk straight across the street.”
Since that, while unkind, was not altogether untrue, Nellie did not rise to it. She did say, “You know I never wanted you to marry him at all.”
“But that wasn’t because he was a Reb,” Edna said. “That was just because he was a man. He could have been on the U.S. General Staff, and you would’ve felt the same way.” That also had a good deal of truth in it. Edna went on, “You just don’t want a girl to have any fun, and look at what all you done when you was my age and even younger.”
“That’s wasn’t fun,” Nellie replied. “That was hell, is what that was.” But Edna didn’t believe her. She could see as much in her daughter’s eyes. Edna was convinced she was acting like a dog in the manger. What Edna wanted was to screw herself silly, not having a clue how silly she was already. With a sigh, Nellie said, “Get a pot of coffee going, why don’t you? I could use a cup, and I bet you could, too.”