And how long would it be before the Navy stopped sweeping for mines and started laying them again? George didn't like the headlines coming out of the states that had changed hands between the CSA and the USA. President Smith was loudly declaring he'd removed the last reasons for war on the North American continent. George hoped he was right. As far as he could see, everybody hoped the president was right.
Gulls glided along overhead. They always followed fishing boats, hoping for handouts from the garbage and offal that went over the side. They did better when the boats were farther out to sea and actually fishing, but that didn't keep them from being optimistic whenever they saw fishermen.
George stopped in the cramped little galley for a mug of coffee. He took it up to the Sweet Sue's bow and drank it there. The hot, sweet, creamy brew and the fresh breeze from the fishing boat's passage helped submerge the last of his headache. His cure wasn't so drastic as Johnny O'Shea's, but he hadn't hurt himself so badly the night before, either.
Going out to the Grand Bank was a long haul. Once the ocean surrounded the Sweet Sue on all sides, she might not have been moving at all. No landscape changed to prove she was. Every so often, she would pass an inbound fishing boat. Captain Albert would get on the wireless then, doing his best to find out exactly where the fish were biting best.
When my old man went to sea, his boat didn't even have wireless, George thought. He remembered his mother saying his father hadn't know that crazy Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke till he got back to T Wharf after a fishing trip. And when a Confederate commerce raider captured him and sank his boat, his skipper back then hadn't been able to yell for help. He'd been interned in North Carolina for months before the Confederates finally let him go.
On George's first night in the tiny, cramped bunk up at the bow, he tossed and turned and slept very badly. He always did his first night at sea. He'd got used to a bed that didn't shift under him, to one where he could roll over without falling out, to one where he could sit up suddenly without banging his head-hell, to one with Connie in it, sweet and warm and mostly willing. He knew he'd be all right tomorrow, but tonight was tough.
More coffee persuaded his eyes they really did want to stay open the next morning. He poured in the cream as if there were no tomorrow. So did everybody else. Even on ice, it wouldn't stay fresh through the cruise, so they enjoyed it while they could. By the same token, Davey Hatton did up enormous plates of scrambled eggs for the fishermen.
"By God, Cookie, yesterday I'd've puked these up," Johnny O'Shea said. "This morning, they're goddamn good." He shoveled another forkful into his face.
Hatton was a round, red-faced man with a barbed wit. "If somebody'd lit a match under your nose yesterday, he could've used your breath for a blowtorch," he replied. "Today you're on your way to remembering your name."
"Fuck you," Johnny said sweetly.
The cook nodded. "There-you see? I knew that was it." The men in the crowded galley laughed. Even Johnny laughed-he knew he'd lost that round.
When the Sweet Sue finally got out to the Grand Bank, there was little more time for laughter. Boats from the USA, the CSA, the Republic of Quebec, occupied Canada and Newfoundland, Britain, Ireland, France, and Portugal bobbed here and there on the ocean. Captain Albert found a place at the edge of one pack of boats and started fishing.
George lost track of how many big hooks he baited with frozen squid. The process was as automatic as breathing for him. If he'd thought about it, he probably would have stuck himself. Every so often, somebody did. Then it was the nasty business of pushing the barb through and snipping it off, the even nastier business of iodine, and, if a man hadn't had one in a while, a tetanus shot from the first-aid kit. And, with his hand bandaged, he'd go back to fixing hooks.
But when the lines came in… when the lines came in, work really started. Gaffing a wriggling tuna that weighed as much as a man, gutting it, kicking the offal over the side, and getting the fish into the ice in the hold went on hour after hour. Sometimes it wouldn't be a tuna-it would be a tuna head, proof that a shark had found the fish first. Off the hook, over the side. Sometimes a shark would be on the hook. Gaff him, gut him so he stayed dead, and pitch him overboard.
The endless fishing went on for the next three weeks. By then, the Sweet Sue had more than twenty tons of tuna in her hold and rode noticeably lower in the water than she had when she set out from T Wharf. George still didn't know how good a trip it was. He wouldn't till the skipper sold the tuna. But he knew he was finally ready to head back to Boston. After all, he had to remind his kids who he was.
Brigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. He felt betrayed not only by the War Department-which would have been nothing tremendously unusual-but also by the entire government of the United States. Having the whole government gang up on him didn't happen every day.
But Dowling certainly felt it had happened here. He'd come to Covington to help keep Kentucky in the United States. He'd got a good start on doing just that, too. And then Al Smith had jerked the rug out from under him by going to Richmond and agreeing to a plebiscite. The only way the USA could win that plebiscite would be for Jesus Christ to appear in Louisville and curse Jake Featherston with words that glowed like burning coals-and even then it would be close.
Now, ironically, what Dowling was watching over was the presidential election campaign. Up till Al Smith said there would be a plebiscite after all, he couldn't have got elected dog catcher in Kentucky. Now Red Socialist posters were everywhere in Covington. They showed Smith's face and the slogan, the happy warrior-he's kept us out of war. More went up all the time, too.
The Democrats were running Senator Bob Taft-son of longtime Congressman William Howard Taft-from across the river in Ohio. In a normal year, he would have scored well in conservative Kentucky. This wasn't a normal year, nor was Kentucky a normal state. The Freedom Party had ambushed the local Democrats from the right, and the Freedom Party, taking its cue from Richmond, was loudly for Smith.
Besides, Taft had denounced the plebiscite. Like most Democrats, he remained in favor of holding on to the gains the USA had made in the Great War. That would have doomed him here anyway.
"Isn't it grand?" Dowling said at supper one evening. "Kentucky will vote Socialist in February, and then it'll vote Freedom in January. Tell me how that makes sense."
All the officers with whom he was eating were junior to him, of course. None of them ventured to claim that it didn't make sense, or that he was worrying too much. A major did say, "At least the Freedom Party is on its best behavior from now until January."
"Bully!" Dowling exploded, which made the younger officers look at one another. He caught the looks, and knew why they made them. They didn't say bully, and they thought only dinosaurs-anyone who remembered the nineteenth century certainly qualified-did. Dowling was too exercised to care. He went on, "Of course those bastards will be on their best behavior. They don't have to blow things up any more to get what they want. All they have to do is wait. Wouldn't you be on your best behavior, too?"
"Uh, yes, sir," the major replied. "The only trouble is, their being quiet goes a long way toward making our presence here irrelevant, wouldn't you say?"
"Like hell I would," Dowling growled. "If we weren't here, if we weren't doing the job we're supposed to do, how much worse would things be?"
The major, being only a major, did not presume to contradict. That helped ease Dowling's mind-a little. He kept up a bold front not least for the sake of the men he commanded. He wasn't about to admit he thought his presence in Kentucky was irrelevant. He wouldn't admit it to anyone but himself, anyhow.