“Gotta go, Doc. Good luck to you.” Without waiting for a reply, the Army mail clerk hopped back into the command car and drove away.
O’Doull carried the stack of envelopes and magazines and newspapers and small packages up into the train. “Mail call!” he shouted, and for the next couple of minutes he was the most popular guy around.
Once the mail was all doled out, that popularity naturally faded. Only Granville McDougald hung around. He looked glum. To show why, he held up an envelope. It had a big handstamp on it: RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESSEE DECEASED.
“I’m sorry, Granny,” O’Doull said. “Who is it?”
“Fellow I’ve known since the Great War. He lost a hand then, so they wouldn’t let him stay in the Army, not even as a medic. Dammit, Don was a good guy-one of the best. Now I’ve got to see if I can come up with his sister’s address, find out what happened to him.”
The letter had gone to Trenton, New Jersey. Confederate bombers certainly reached that far. But other things could happen to a middle-aged man, too. As a middle-aged man himself, O’Doull knew that much too well. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” he repeated. “Whatever it was, I hope it was quick.”
“Yeah. Amen,” McDougald said. They’d both seen too many men who lingered in agony and would not let go of life, even if some of them wanted to. A fast end-dead before he knew what hit him-was far from the smallest mercy the world had to offer, and the world didn’t offer it often enough.
“Here.” O’Doull reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of brandy. “Have a knock of this. Medicinal, you know.”
“Sure. Thanks, Doc. You’re a medical genius.” McDougald took the bottle and raised it in salute. “Here’s to you, Don.” He took one long swig, then handed it back. O’Doull put it away and closed the bag.
As an officer, O’Doull had a Pullman berth. He took his letters there to read them in curtained-off privacy. He opened the one from Georges first. It was the usual nonsense from his brother-in-law: the usual nonsense with the usual ironic sting. Aren’t you glad I am not an English-speaking Canadian? Georges wrote-in English, not the French that was his usual language and that he used for almost all of the letter. He went on in English for one more sentence: If I were, you might have to shoot me. After that, he returned to his own tongue and the usual doings in and around Riviere-du-Loup.
O’Doull wondered whether Georges had had someone else compose that English for him. He would have studied the language in school before the Great War, when Quebec was still part of Canada, but when would he have needed it since? Of course, being Georges, he might have remembered it just so he could make a sarcastic nuisance of himself thirty years later. The uprising in anglophone Canada worried O’Doull, too, and not because he might be called on to pick up a rifle himself.
He went through his wife’s letters one by one, starting with the earliest. He got more gossip from Riviere-du-Loup, and a different view of a small scandal involving a greengrocer and the butcher’s wife. Georges had treated the whole thing as a joke. To Nicole, the butcher was a brute and his wife looking for happiness wherever she could find it. O’Doull himself knew all the people involved, but not well. He wouldn’t have cared to judge where, if anywhere, the rights and wrongs lay.
Nicole didn’t talk about the Canadian uprising till her next to last letter. Then she wrote, There is a bill in the House of Deputies to extend military service. I am lighting candles and praying it does not pass.
“So am I, sweetheart,” O’Doull muttered, and then, “Moi aussi.” He’d seen news about that bill, too. The United States were doing everything they could to get the Republic of Quebec to contribute more men to quelling the revolt north of the forty-ninth parallel. That way, the United States wouldn’t have to pull so many of their own men off the fighting front against the Confederates, or even out of rebellion-wracked Utah.
But if the Republic of Quebec did contribute more soldiers, one of them was much too likely to be a young man named Lucien O’Doull. One of the great advantages of living in Quebec was that the country was technically neutral, even if it inclined toward the USA. Leonard O’Doull hadn’t had to worry about his boy’s becoming a soldier. He hadn’t had to-but now he did.
Nicole, naturally, kept a close eye on the bill’s progress. Her latest letter reported that it had come out of committee. I do not know anyone who favors this bill, not a single soul, she wrote bitterly. It moves forward anyway. It moves forward because the politicians are afraid of what the United States will do to us if it fails.
She was bound to be right about that. Without the United States, there wouldn’t have been a Republic of Quebec. The Republic’s economy had very strong ties to the USA, as strong as the Americans could make them. If Quebec made the United States unhappy, the USA could make the Republic unhappier.
O’Doull swore under his breath. He understood both sides, but, because of Lucien, hoped the Republic’s politicians would show some backbone. All politics is personal, he thought.
After getting everything off her chest, his wife went back to family chatter and the nine-days’ wonders of Riviere-du-Loup. It was as if she didn’t want to look at what she’d written about the bill, either. Only one more sentence at the end of the letter betrayed her worry: I wish you were home.
“I wish I was home, too, dammit,” O’Doull muttered. But he damn well wasn’t, and whose fault was that? No one’s but his own. The United States were his country, and he’d volunteered to help them in a way that best matched his skills and talents. And so here he was in a white-painted train, rumbling along toward more trouble. “Happy day.”
He wondered how the United States could find more trouble than they already had. With Japan bearing down on the Sandwich Islands, with the Confederates raising hell in Ohio and heading for Pennsylvania, with the Mormons still kicking up their heels in Utah and the Canucks north of the border, that looked as if all the troubles in the world, or at least on the continent, had come home to roost.
Back before the Great War, people had talked about how encircled the United States were, with the CSA, Canada, Britain, and France all keeping a wary eye on the giant they’d tied down. The country had burst its bounds in the war, and dominated North America for a generation. Now everybody else was trying to get the ropes back on again.
If Canada broke away from U.S. occupation, if British influence returned to the northern part of the continent, how long could the Republic of Quebec stay independent? That had to be on the minds of the politicians in Quebec City. It was on Leonard O’Doull’s mind, too. But so was his son, and his son counted for infinitely more.
Engine puffing, iron wheels screeching against the track and throwing up sun-colored sparks, the train stopped. O’Doull opened the curtains in front of the window and looked out. They were, as far as he could tell, in the middle of nowhere. Something had gone wrong up ahead, but he couldn’t make out what.
The conductor was a Medical Service corporal. O’Doull hoped he made a better corpsman than conductor, because he wasn’t very good at his secondary role. But he did have an answer when the doctor asked him what had happened farther west: “Sabotage.” He seemed to take a certain somber pleasure in the word.
“ ’Osti!” O’Doull burst out, which made the noncom give him a curious look. O’Doull looked back in plain warning. The other man decided walking down the corridor would be a good idea.
O’Doull shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the corporal. No, the trouble was just the opposite. As long as Confederate operatives sounded reasonably Yankeelike, they could hide in plain sight till they went off to work mischief in the middle of the night.
No doubt U.S. operatives were doing the same thing on the other side of the border, and helping C.S. Negroes in their sputtering civil war against Jake Featherston’s government. O’Doull hoped they were, anyhow. But that didn’t do him, or this train, any good at all.
Three hours later, after a repair crew filled in a crater and laid new track across it, the train got rolling again. By then, the sun was going down in the west and O’Doull was going up in smoke. If he was going to be useful, he wanted to be useful. He couldn’t do a damn thing stuck here on a train track.
Unlike most trains, this one rolled through the night all lit up. Trains full of soldiers and weapons and raw materials sneaked along, trusting to darkness to hide them from Confederate aircraft. This one showed its true colors, and the enemy left it alone.
">There were whispers that the Confederates sometimes used the Red Cross to disguise troop movements. O’Doull hoped that wasn’t so. It would make C.S. raiders want to disregard the symbol when the USA used it, and it would make the United States distrust even legitimate Confederate uses. Things were hard enough as they were. Did they have to-could they-get even worse?