“Maybe we should have brought the girls,” Maude said, her voice under tight rein. Only her mouth moved; she did not turn her head to look at her husband.
He shook his head. “No-better we left them with the Lang-dons.” His own harshly carved face got harsher yet. “The Yanks won’t take pity on us because we’ve got ’em along, Maude. Next Yank officer who knows what pity’s about will be the first. If we’re going to persuade them to let Alexander go, we’ll have to make a case, like we were in court.”
She nodded once, jerkily, and then sat still again. The wagon jounced on toward Rosenfeld. The ruts in the road didn’t fit the width of the wheels any more; U.S. trucks had cut their own ruts. Outside of town, U.S. soldiers inspected the wagon as carefully as they had when the whole McGregor clan came into Rosenfeld the day Alexander was seized. Finding nothing, the soldiers let the wagon go on.
As usual these days, Yankees far outnumbered Canadians on Rosenfeld’s few streets. Their traffic-wagons, trucks, a swarm of honking Fords-took priority over civilian vehicles, too. McGregor hitched the wagon as soon as he could, put a feed bag on the horse’s head, and walked toward what had been the sheriff’s office and jail but now confined not drunks and burglars but men guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be free of the smothering embrace of the United States.
Outside the entrance stood two armed sentries in green-gray. One of them patted down McGregor. The other spoke to Maude: “Come with me, ma’am. We have a woman next door to search you.” When she made as if to balk, the sentry said, “Ma’am, if you aren’t searched, you don’t go in. Those are the orders I have, and I can’t change ’em.” Back quivering with indignation, she followed him.
“You aren’t trying very hard to make friends for yourselves, are you?” McGregor said to the remaining sentry.
The fellow shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”
Maude returned in a couple of minutes, looking even more furious coming than she had going. She must have satisfied the searcher, though, for the sentries opened the door and stood aside to let her and her husband make their petition to the occupying authorities.
Captain Hannebrink sat at a desk, filling out forms. But for his uniform, he might have been a postmaster like Wilfred Rokeby, or perhaps a bank teller. But he’d seemed soldierly enough and to spare out at McGregor’s farm. He set down his pen now and got to his feet. “Mr. and Mrs. McGregor,” he said, polite enough even if his minions weren’t.
“Good morning, Captain,” Arthur McGregor said. He hated having to crawl before any man. He’d worked like a plow horse-he’d worked harder than his plow horse-before the war, but he’d been free.
No. He’d thought he’d been free. It was just that the government-the government he’d frequently despised-had held trouble at arm’s length from him. Then it couldn’t do that any more, and the regime under which he now lived made trouble as close as a punch in the eye.
He might not have crawled for himself. For Alexander, for his only son, he would crawl. What was pride worth, set against your boy? He began again: “Captain Hannebrink, sir, by now you must know Alexander didn’t have anything to do with that bomb on the train tracks.”
“I must know it?” The American officer shook his head. “Here, sit down, both of you. I’ll hear what you have to say.” The chairs to which he pointed were hard, angular, and functionaclass="underline" U.S. Army issue, as out of place in the office as his sharp American accent. He let Arthur McGregor do the fussing for his wife, accurately surmising she would not want him pushing the chair about for her. When she was as comfortable as she could be, he sat back down himself. “All right, tell me why I must know that.”
“Because of what you done to the other boys you caught,” McGregor blurted. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a snarl of anger at himself: he hadn’t meant to say it like that. Saying it like that made him think about how harsh the occupying authorities really were.
Captain Hannebrink steepled his fingers. “The penalty for sabotage against the United States Army is death, Mr. McGregor,” he said. “We have made that very plain. It cannot come as a surprise to anyone, not now.”
“Boys,” McGregor said thickly. “You shot boys.”
“They were playing a man’s game, I’m sorry to say. If they’d succeeded, what they would have done to our train would have been no different because they were young,” Hannebrink said. “This way, perhaps, other boys here in Manitoba will come to understand that this is not a bully, romantic lark. This is a war, and will be waged as such.”
He didn’t look particularly fearsome. He was on the lean side, with sandy hair, mild gray eyes, and a long, thoughtful face. Only his uniform and his waxed Kaiser Wilhelm mustache said he wasn’t a Canadian. Somehow, that very plainness made him more frightening, not less.
Licking his lips, Arthur McGregor said, “But you didn’t shoot Alexander. That must mean you know he didn’t have anything to do with it, because-” Because if you had even the slightest suspicion, you would have dragged him out against a wall, given him a blindfold, and sent him home to me in a pine box for burial. But he couldn’t say that to the American.
“Your son’s case is not clearcut: I admit as much,” Hannebrink said. “It is possible he did not know about this particular explosive device.” He held up one finger, as if expecting McGregor to interrupt. “Possible, I say. By no means proven. There appears to be no doubt he associated with these subversives and saboteurs.”
“They’re his friends,” Maude McGregor burst out. “Captain, they’re boys he’s known as long as he’s been on this earth. And besides, where in Canada will you find any boys that age who don’t-”
Conversations with Captain Hannebrink had a way of breaking down in midsentence. This one should have broken down a few words sooner. Hannebrink fiddled with one point of that absurd, upjutting mustache, then finished for Maude: “Where will I find Canadian boys that age who don’t despise the United States and everything they stand for? There are some, Mrs. McGregor, I assure you of that.”
His matter-of-fact confidence was more chilling than bluster would have been. And Arthur McGregor feared he was right. Some people had to be on the winning side, no matter what, and the USA looked like the winning side right now. Bootlickers, McGregor thought.
But that did not help Alexander. McGregor said, “You can’t blame him for what these others tried to do.”
“Why can’t I?” Hannebrink returned. “Canadian law recognizes the concepts of an accessory before the fact and of concealment of knowledge of a crime to be committed.”
“You’ve never claimed you had anyone who said Alexander knew about this, only that he knew some of the boys you say did it,” Arthur McGregor said stubbornly. “Is that enough to go on holding him?”
“Of course it is,” Captain Hannebrink answered. “I assume anyone who consorts with saboteurs and says nothing about it either is a saboteur himself or wants to be one.”
“You don’t want reasons to let my boy go.” Maude’s voice went shrill. “You just want an excuse to keep him in an iron cage when he hasn’t done anything.”
Arthur McGregor set a big-knuckled, blunt-fingered hand on his wife’s arm. “That doesn’t help,” he said mildly. If Maude lost her temper here, it wouldn’t just be unfortunate. It would be disastrous.
Captain Hannebrink said, “Mrs. McGregor, I can understand how you feel, but-”
“Can you?” she said. “If we’d invaded your country and dragged your son away to jail, how would you feel?”
“Wretched, I’m sure,” he answered, though he didn’t sound as if he meant it. He went on, “Please let me finish the point I was trying to make. You still do not seem to fully understand the situation. You are in occupied territory, Mrs. McGregor. The military administration of the United States does not need any excuses to confine individuals. We have the authority to do it, and we have the power to do it.”