“Like Paul Revere,” Stone muttered, and Moss ruefully nodded.
“Maybe you won that time,” he said to Laura who had been born Secord, “but we’re here to stay now. You may as well learn to like it.”
“Go on your way, Yank,” she said, tossing her head. “You’ll be older than Methuselah before we learn to like it. And don’t be too sure you’re here to stay, either. We’re still in the fight.” The slight Scots burr that distinguished the Canadian accent from the American made her sound very determined indeed.
“Where is your husband?” Percy Stone demanded, his voice suddenly harsh, too.
“Where? Where do you think? In the Canadian Army, where he belongs,” the young woman answered. “I told you once-now I tell you again, go on your way.” She spoke with an odd authority, as if she owned the land and were entitled to give commands on it.
The breeze picked up her yellow hair, which hung uncurled and unconfined, and threw it out behind her like a flag. Her eyes, granite gray, blazed. If her husband was anywhere near as formidable as she, Moss thought, he’d be one dangerous Canuck with a rifle in his hands. Just for a moment, she put the flier in mind of a Viking, and made him wonder, only a little less than seriously, if she’d charge down on him and Stone.
She did take a step toward the two Americans. It was not a charge, though. Her face crumpled; tears ran down her cheeks. Her voice choked, she said, “Go on. Can you not have at least the simple human decency to let me be? Is that too much to ask?”
Without answering her, without looking at Percy Stone, Moss started riding again. A moment later, the former photographer from Ohio joined him. “Quite a lot of woman there,” Stone remarked after a bit.
Jonathan Moss nodded. “Quite a lot of lady there, too,” he said. “After a while, you forget the difference between the one and the other, till it up and stares you in the face.”
Stone nodded. “A woman like that-” He sighed. “She makes you wish she liked the USA better. If we could win over that kind of people, we’d win the war and the peace both.”
“I wonder what they do in Canada instead of Remembrance Day,” Moss said. “They’ve been on top so long, they don’t know what it’s like to be on the bottom. And”-he tried to forestall his friend-“I don’t give a damn about what the first Laura Secord did a hundred years ago.”
“Why not?” Stone said, not about to be forestalled. “If she hadn’t made it through those woods back then, maybe Canada would have been part of the USA the past hundred years, and we wouldn’t have to worry about beating the Canucks now.”
“If I’m going to play the game of might-have-beens, I’d sooner play it with the War of Secession, thanks. If we’d won that and kept the damn Rebs in the United States with us, maybe-”
“Fat chance,” Percy Stone said. “They had England and France on their side, and Lee and Jackson for generals. Jackson licked us again twenty years later, too. And what did we have? President Abraham Lincoln!” His lip curled contemptuously.
Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.
VII
Everything squelched. That was Private First Class Reginald Bartlett’s overwhelming impression of the Red River bottomlands. If you put a foot down on the boggy ground, it squelched. If you dug a spade into it, threw away the dirt, and turned your back for a minute, the hole would be half full of water when you turned around again.
“We have to dig in, men,” First Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll said, over and over, as he was in the habit of saying things over and over. “We have to hold on to whatever corners of Sequoyah we can, same as the British and the Belgians are keeping some of Belgium free from the Hun’s boot. They’re entrenched in the muck of Flanders, same as we are here. We have to hold on.”
“Good thing the British and the Belgians are helpin’ us keep the Huns out of Sequoyah, ain’t it?” Napoleon Dibble said.
“Sure as hell is,” Reggie agreed gravely. “And it’s just as much a fact-God damn me to hell if it’s not-that what we’re doing right here, Nap, is keeping the damnyankees from pouring troops into Belgium.”
“For true?” Nap Dibble’s eyes got big and round. “I didn’t know that.” He started digging like a man with a mission, dirt flying from his entrenching tool as if from a steam shovel. “Then this here’s important business, I reckon.”
Sergeant Pete Hairston coughed a couple of times, then pinned Reggie under his gaze as an entomologist might have pinned a butterfly to his specimen board. “God damn you to hell is right,” the veteran grunted in a low voice, so Bartlett would hear and the still furiously digging Dibble wouldn’t.
“Have a heart, Sarge,” Reggie said, also quietly. “I wasn’t telling him anything that wasn’t so, now was I?”
“Maybe not,” Sergeant Hairston answered. “But you sure as hell weren’t telling him anything he could use, neither.” He slapped at himself and cursed. “I’ll tell you what I could use. I could use one of those goddamn flame-throwing gadgets they’re starting to issue, that’s what.”
“You don’t want to just shoot the damnyankees?” Reggie asked. “You want to toast ’em instead?”
“Fuck toasting the damnyankees,” Hairston answered. “You got to be crazy to want to get up close enough to ’em to use one o’ them flamethrowers. Nah, what I want to do is, I want to wave that damn thing around and toast me about a million billion mosquitoes.” He slapped again.
“Ah. Now I get you, Sarge.” Reggie Bartlett was slapping, too, and not having much luck. “And after you toasted that million billion, there’d only be about a jillion million billion of the sons of bitches left, and that doesn’t count the chiggers or the ticks or the leeches.”
“Don’t remind me.” Not only did Hairston slap, he scratched, too. “And fleas and cooties and all the other little bastards.”
“Back in Richmond, I was a druggist’s helper,” Bartlett said wistfully. “Seems like a hundred years ago now. This time of year, we’d sell camphor candles by the dozen, to keep the mosquitoes away, and zinc-oxide ointment, and little bottles of kerosene with perfume in it to kill lice and nits. Some pretty high-class folks would buy that stuff, too.”
“Always knew there was a bunch of lousy bastards runnin’ things in Richmond,” Hairston said. “Just goes and proves things, don’t it?”
Joe Mopope came mooching along. What he was looking to see, Reggie knew, was whether the entrenchments had got big and deep enough for him to scramble down into them without doing any digging of his own. The Kiowa was a hell of a fighting man. He enjoyed fighting. What he didn’t enjoy was the work that went into making sure you stayed alive in between fights.
“Hey, Joe,” Reggie called, “you got any secret Indian tricks for keeping the mosquitoes and things off you?”
“You got to do two things,” the Kiowa answered. His long face was serious to the point of being somber. All the white men in earshot leaned forward to hear his words of wisdom. Seeing that he had everybody’s attention, he gave a dramatic pause as good as anything on a vaudeville stage, then went on, “You got to slap like hell, and you got to scratch like hell.”
“And you got to go to hell, Joe,” Sergeant Hairston said, but he was laughing. Joe Mopope never cracked a smile. Hairston added, “You got us good that time, but I’m gonna get you back. I know just how, too: hop down here, whip out a spade, and set yourself to diggin’.”
“Damnyankees wouldn’t treat me this way,” Mopope said. He did start entrenching, although without much enthusiasm. “Maybe I should have stayed in town and let them come along.”
“Oh, yeah.” Hairston’s nod was venomously sarcastic. “That would have been really great, Joe. The CSA’s let you Indians do pretty much like you please up here in Sequoyah. Ain’t been like that in the USA. After we licked ’em in the War of Secession, they took out after the Sioux, and they been takin’ out after their redskins ever since. They purely don’t fancy your kind of people, and I don’t reckon they’d give you a big kiss now.”