Alec Pomeroy wrinkled his nose when he walked into the barn on his grandmother's farm. "It smells like animal poop in here!" he said.
"Well… yes." His mother fought not to laugh. To Mary Pomeroy, the smell of a barn was one of the most normal, natural things in the world. She'd grown up with it. Even now, she took it altogether for granted. But Alec was town-raised. Farm life and farm smells didn't come natural to him. Mary said, "Don't you like it?"
"No! Eww! It's nasty! It's disgustering!" Alec hadn't quite learned how to say that, but he knew what he meant.
"Well, why don't you go back to Grandma at the farmhouse, then?" Mary said. "If you ask her nicely, maybe-just maybe-she'll let you have another piece of rhubarb pie."
"Do you think so?" Alec's eyes got big.
"You'll never know till you try, will you?" Mary said. Alec was off like a shot.
Mary breathed a sigh of relief. She'd hoped the odor of the barn would be enough to get her son out of her hair for a little while. She didn't need long. The old wagon wheel still lay in the same old place. Moving it took an effort, but not an enormous one. She scraped away the dirt under it, and then lifted up the flat board the dirt concealed.
Under the board was a hole her father had dug. Mary nodded to herself. She'd taken years to find that hole. No one else ever had. It had kept Arthur McGregor's bomb-making tools safe, even though the Yanks had searched the farm at least a dozen times.
And now it would keep them safe again. Mary was carrying the biggest handbag she owned, one the size of a young suitcase. It was plenty big enough to hold the dynamite and blasting caps and fuse and crimpers and other specialized tools of the bomber's trade.
She took them out of the purse and put them back in the hole from which she'd exhumed them years before. You're not going in there forever, she thought, only for a while. Who could say whether Wilf Rokeby would tell the occupiers what he knew about her? If he decided she was the one who'd planted that flyer in the post office, he would. She wanted the evidence out of the way, just in case.
With the explosives and tools stowed once more, she replaced the board and pushed dirt and straw over it till it looked like the rest of the barn's floor. Then the old wagon wheel went back where it belonged. She scuffed around the dirt where it had lain after she'd moved it, so that place looked ordinary, too.
Then she had to clean her hands as best she could on her skirt. Fortunately, it was beige, so the dust hardly showed. She looked around one more time. Satisfied she'd set everything to rights, she went back to the farmhouse herself.
As she always did, she felt as if she were falling back into her childhood when she went inside. But how had her mother got old? Maude McGregor's hair was supposed to be as red as her own, not this dull, lifeless gray. And when had her back begun to bend?
Alec was devastating an enormous chunk of rhubarb pie. Mary's mother looked up with a smile on her face. It slipped a little when her eyes met Mary's. "Did you take care of whatever needed taking care of?" she asked.
Maude McGregor had never said much of anything about what Arthur McGregor had done. She'd known. Mary was sure of that. Her mother couldn't have failed to know. But she'd got into the habit of keeping quiet, and she'd stuck with it. She'd never said much of anything about what Mary was up to, either. Plainly, though, she also knew about that-or knew enough, anyhow.
Mary nodded now. "Everything's fine, Ma. Everything's just fine."
"Good," her mother said. "Always nice to have you visit, dear. Don't want to see any trouble. Don't want to see any trouble at all. We've had enough, haven't we? Come back whenever you need to."
"Can I have some more pie?" Alec asked.
"If you eat any more pie, you'll turn into a rhubarb," Mary said. That was the wrong approach; Alec liked the idea. He would have liked it even better if he'd had any idea what a rhubarb looked like.
He'd eaten enough rhubarb pie and other things to fall asleep on the trip home. He hardly ever did that any more, however much Mary wished he would. He'd be grumpy when he woke up, grumpy and then bouncy. Mary knew he wouldn't want to go to bed tonight. She'd worry about that later. You sure will, she told herself.
On the way back into town, the Oldsmobile bumped over the railroad tracks. Alec stirred and muttered, but didn't rouse. Mary smiled to herself. One of these days before too long… but not quite yet.
"I hope you told your mother hello for me," Mort said when he got home that night.
"Of course I did," Mary said.
"That's good." His smile was wide and genial, as usual. "I'm glad. You haven't been out there for a while. Is she still all right by herself?"
With a parent getting older, that was always a worry, and Mary had noticed how the years were starting to lie heavy on her mother's shoulders. Even so, she nodded. "For a while longer, I think. She hangs on. That farm is her life-that and her grandchildren." For some reason, Alec wasn't much interested in supper. Mary didn't scold him, not after what she knew he'd put away.
Three days later, someone knocked on the door in the middle of the afternoon. When Mary opened it, she found herself facing a tall, skinny, swarthy officer in a blue-gray uniform. "Mrs. Pomeroy?" he asked in accented English. "I am Captain Brassens of the Army of the Republic of Quebec." He touched one corner of the skinny black mustache that made him look like a cinema villain. Behind him stood four or five soldiers, Frenchies all.
"Yes?" Mary said. "And so? What do you want with me? I haven't done anything."
"It could be," Captain Brassens said. "Or it could be otherwise. We shall see. Do you know a certain Mrs. Laura Moss, formerly Laura Secord, of Berlin, Ontario?"
"Never heard of her," Mary said at once. Wilf Rokeby was throwing mud, then. She might have known. She had known.
Brassens's raised eyebrow was Gallic almost to the point of self-parody. "You deny, then, that you posted to the said Mrs. Moss a package shortly before a bomb burst in her flat, killing her and her young daughter?"
"Of course I deny it," Mary said. "I've never heard anything so ridiculous in all my born days."
"This may be true. Or, on the other hand, this may be something other than true." Captain Brassens turned to the men at his back and spoke to them in French. Mary knew next to nothing of what had been Canada's other language. The soldiers showed her what their commander had said, though. They turned her apartment upside down.
"I don't suppose you have a warrant," she said as they got to work.
The Quebecois officer shook his head. "I have none. I need none. Military occupation takes precedence. You should know this." He looked at her reproachfully, as if to say he might have to give her a low mark because of her ignorance. But she knew. She'd just wanted to get her protest on the record.
And she had one more protest to add: "I think it's a crying shame you can do this to an innocent person who's never done anybody any harm."
"So you say," Captain Brassens answered coldly. "But is it not true that your brother was shot for sabotage? Is it not true that your father was a notorious bomber who killed many? It could be that you are an innocent person. It could be, yes. But it also could be that you are not. We shall see."
Wilf Rokeby must have been singing like a meadowlark in spring. He has a yellow belly like a meadowlark, too, Mary thought. "You can't blame me for what my family did-and my brother never did anything," she told Brassens. "Go ahead and look as much as you please. I've got nothing to hide." That's the truth. I already hid it.
The soldiers were gentle with Alec. They didn't let him interfere, but they didn't smack him or even shout at him. He seemed to decide they were making a mess for the fun of it. To a little boy, that was a perfectly reasonable conclusion. He started throwing things around, too. The Frenchies thought that was funny.
After they'd done their worst, they reported back to Captain Brassens. They spoke French, so Mary didn't know what they said. He asked them several sharp questions in the same language. After they'd answered, he turned to her and said, "Eh bien, it appears-it appears, mind you-that you have been telling the truth and someone else is the liar. We shall remember that."