“The same, I expect.” Rokeby licked his thin, pale lips. Lamplight glistened from the metal frames of the half-glasses he was wearing, and from the lenses that magnified his eyes without making them seem warm. “What can I do for you today, eh?”
“Want to buy some postage stamps,” McGregor answered. “When I need beans, I’ll go to Henry Gibbon.” In a different tone of voice, it would have been a joke. As he said it, it was only a statement of fact. He’d seldom joked before Alexander was shot. He never joked now.
“Sure enough.” Rokeby bent his head down and looked over the tops of those glasses as he opened a drawer. McGregor studied the part that ran down the middle of his crown, dividing the brown hair on one side from that on the other as if Moses had had a bit of a miracle left over after parting the Red Sea. To make sure none of his hairs got Egyptian tendencies, Rokeby slicked them all down with an oil reeking of spices. The odor was part of coming to the post office for McGregor, as it was for everyone in and around Rosenfeld. After taking out a sheet of stamps, Rokeby looked up at the farmer. “How many you need?”
“Let me have fifteen,” McGregor answered. “That’ll keep me for a while.”
“Should, anyway,” the postmaster agreed. “Sixty cents’ll do it.”
McGregor stared at him, then at the stamps. They were some shade of red or other, though only a stamp collector could have told at a glance exactly which. Every country in the world used some sort of red for its letter-rate stamps. And the letter rate in occupied Manitoba, as it had been before the war, as it was in the USA and CSA, was two cents.
“Don’t you mean half that?” he asked Wilfred Rokeby. “Look, Wilf, I can see for myself they’re two-cent stamps.” They were, as far as he was concerned, ugly two-cent stamps. They showed a U.S. aeroplane shooting down one either British or Canadian-the picture was too small for him to be sure which.
“Two cents still is the letter rate, sure enough,” Rokeby said. “But you got to pay four cents each to get ’em, all the same. These here are what they call semipostal stamps: only kind we’re gonna be able to sell hereabouts from now on. See? Look.” He pointed to the lower left-hand corner of the stamp. Sure enough, it didn’t just say 2. It said 2 + 2, as if it were part of a beginning arithmetic lesson.
“Semi-what?” McGregor said. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? And if two cents is the letter rate but I’ve got to pay twice that much to get one of these things, where do the other two cents go?”
“Into the Yankees’ pockets-where else?” the postmaster said. “Into a fund that pays ’em to send actors and dancing girls and I don’t know what all out toward the front to keep their soldiers happy.”
“We get to pay so they can do that?” McGregor demanded. Wilfred Rokeby nodded. McGregor took a deep breath. “That’s-thievery, is what it is,” he said slowly, suppressing the scream.
“You know it, and I know it, and I expect the Yankees know it, too,” Rokeby said. “Next question is, do they care? You can figure that one out for your own self. If we’re paying for their damn vaudeville shows, they can spend more of their money on guns.”
In its way, the casual exploitation of occupied Canada appalled McGregor almost as much as the casual execution of his son. It showed how the invaders had the conquest planned out to the last little detail. “What happens if we don’t pay the extra two cents?” he asked, already sure of the answer.
“The surcharge, you mean?” Rokeby’s fussiness extended to using precisely the right word whenever he could (come to that, McGregor didn’t remember ever hearing damn from him before). “If you don’t pay the surcharge, Arthur, I can’t sell you the stamps, and you can’t mail your letters.”
“You don’t happen to have any of the old ones left?” McGregor asked.
“Not a one,” Rokeby said. “Sold out of ’em right quick, I did, when these here first came out last month. I’d have expected you to notice the new stamps on your mail by now.”
“Who pays attention to stamps?” McGregor said, which drew a hurt look from the postmaster. The farmer took another deep breath and dug in his pocket. “All right, sell ’em to me. I hope the dancing girls give the Yankee soldiers the clap.”
Rokeby giggled, a high, shrill, startling sound. He gave McGregor fifteen cents’ change from the quarter and half-dollar the farmer laid on the counter. McGregor took the change and the stamps and left the post office shaking his head.
Henry Gibbon’s general store was only a few doors down. The storekeeper nodded when McGregor came inside. “Mornin’, Arthur,” he said.
“Good morning.” McGregor’s eyes needed a little while to adjust to the lantern-lit gloom inside the general store. Boards covered what had been the big window fronting on the street before a bomb blew it out. That was a year ago now. “When are you going to get yourself a new pane of glass?”
“Whenever the Yanks say I can have one,” Gibbon answered; no U.S. soldiers were in the store to overhear his bitterness. “I ain’t holding my breath, I’ll tell you that. How’s your family, Arthur?”
“What I have left of it, you mean?” McGregor said. Bitterness…how could you replace a broken son? But the storekeeper had meant the question kindly. “They’re healthy, Henry. We’re all down at the mouth, but they’re healthy-and thank God for that. We’ll get by.” He stood a little straighter, as if Gibbon had denied it.
“That’s good,” Gibbon said. “I’m glad to hear it. Like I told you last time you were in, I-” He broke off abruptly, for two men in green-gray walked in off the sidewalk and bought a few cents’ worth of candy. When they had left, the storekeeper shook his head. “You see how it is.”
What McGregor saw was Henry Gibbon making money. He didn’t say anything. What could he say? “You still have any of those beans, Henry? I want to buy a couple of sacks if you do.” No postage stamps here, he thought, and almost smiled.
“The kidney beans, you mean? Sure enough do.” Grunting, Gibbon put two sacks of them on the counter. “What else you need?”
“Sewing-machine needles and a quart of vinegar for Maude, and some nails for me,” McGregor answered. “Ten-pennies, the big ones. Got some wood rot in the barn, and I’m going to have to do a deal of patching before the weather gets worse. Don’t want the stock to freeze.” He gave the storekeeper a quart bottle.
“You’re right about that,” Gibbon said, filling the bottle from the spigot of a two-hundred-pound barrel. “How many nails do you want?”
“Twenty pounds’ worth should take care of things,” McGregor said.
“I should hope so,” the storekeeper said with a chuckle. He dug into the relevant barrel with a scoop. But as he dumped a scoopful of nails onto the scale, a frown congealed on his plump features. “Only thing I got to give ’em to you in is a U.S. Army crate. Hope you don’t mind.”
“It’s all right,” Arthur McGregor answered wearily. After a moment, he added, “Not the box’s fault who made it.”
“Well, that’s right.” Gibbon sounded relieved. “It’s only that, what with everything, I didn’t think you’d care to have anything to do with the Yanks.”
“It’s just a crate, Henry.” McGregor dug in his pocket. “What do I owe you for everything?”
“Dollar a sack for the beans,” Gibbon said, scrawling down numbers on a scrap of butcher paper. “Sixty-eight cents for the needles, nineteen for the vinegar, and ninety for the nails. Comes to…” He added up the column, then checked it. “Three dollars and seventy-seven cents.”
“Here you are.” McGregor gave him four dollars, waited for his change, and then said, “Let me bring the wagon by, so I don’t have to haul everything.” The storekeeper nodded, patting the beans and the crate and the jar and the little package to show they’d stay safe till McGregor got back.
As the farmer headed out of Rosenfeld, soldiers in green-gray inspected his purchases. They didn’t usually do that; they were more concerned about keeping dangerous things from coming into town. Seei
ng what he had, they waved him on toward his farm.
A week later, in the middle of the night, he got up from his bed as if to go to the outhouse. Maude muttered something, but didn’t wake. Downstairs, he threw a coat and a pair of boots over his union suit, then went outside. The night was very still. Clouds in the west warned of rain or snow on the way, but the bad weather hadn’t got there yet. For the moment, no traffic to speak of moved on the road near the farm. He nodded to himself, went into the barn, saddled the horse in the darkness, and rode away.
When he came back to bed, Maude was awake. He’d hoped she wouldn’t be. “Why were you gone so long?” she whispered as he slid in beside her.
“Getting rid of some things we don’t need,” he answered, which was no answer at all. He waited for her to press him about it.
All she said was, “Be careful, Arthur,” and rolled over. Soon she was asleep again. Soon he was, too, however much he wanted to stay awake. If anything happened in the night, he didn’t know it.
Three or four days later, Captain Hannebrink drove out to the farm in his green-gray Ford. Out he came. Out came three ordinary soldiers, all of them with guns. Half a minute after that, another automobile, this one all full of soldiers, stopped alongside Hannebrink’s.
Arthur McGregor came out of the barn. He scowled at the American. “What do you want here now, you damned murderer?” he demanded. Through the kitchen window, he saw Maude’s frightened face.
Calmly-and well he might have been calm, with so many armed men at his back-Hannebrink answered, “I hear tell you bought some nails from Henry Gibbon not long ago.”
“I am guilty of that, which is more than my son was guilty of anything,” McGregor said. Maude came outside to find out what was going on. She held Julia’s hand in one of hers, Mary’s in the other. She was holding both daughters tight, for they both looked ready to throw themselves at Hannebrink and the soldiers regardless of rifles and bayonets. McGregor went on, “Have you come to put the blindfold over my eyes because of it?”
“Maybe,” Hannebrink said, calm still. “Show me what you’ve done with them.”
“Come back in here with me,” McGregor told him, motioning toward the barn. Hannebrink followed. So did the American soldiers. So did Maude and Julia and Mary. McGregor pointed here and there along the wall and at the hayloft and up among the rafters. “You’ll see where I’ve done my repairs.”
“Davis-Mathison-Goldberg.” Hannebrink told off three men. “Check those. See if they’re fresh work.”
“Look to be, sir,” one of the men said after he’d clambered up to inspect McGregor’s carpentry at close range. The other two soon called agreement.
“All right, Mr. McGregor,” Hannebrink said, easygoing, in nothing like a hurry. “Say you used a pound or two of nails there. By what I hear, you bought more like twenty pounds. Where’s the rest of ’em?”
“On my workbench here.” McGregor pointed again. “Still in the box Henry Gibbon used for ’em.”
Captain Hannebrink strode over. He picked up a couple of the nails. “New, all right,” he said. “Still have that shine to ’em.” He let them clank back in among their fellows, then picked up the box. He nodded again. “Heft is about right, figuring in what you would have used. Good enough, Mr. McGregor. Thank you.”
“Want to tell me what this is all about?” McGregor asked.
“No.” Without another word, Hannebrink and the U.S. soldiers left the barn, got into their motorcars, and drove back toward Rosenfeld. Maude started to say something. McGregor set a hand on her shoulder and shook his head. She took their daughters back into the house. He wondered if she’d ask him questions later. She didn’t do that, either.
A day or two later, he had to go into town again himself. He stopped by the post office to see if Wilfred Rokeby had any stamps but those larcenous semipostals. Rokeby didn’t, but he did have news: “The Knights are in more trouble with the Yanks,” he said.
“What now?” McGregor asked. “Haven’t been off the farm since I was here last, and nobody much comes and visits. People figure bad luck rubs off, seems like.”
“Bomb in the roadway near their land killed the man who stepped on it last week, and three more besides,” Rokeby answered. “Good many hurt, too. Yanks say they planted it because of their boy.”
“Stupid to set a bomb by your own house,” McGregor remarked, “but the Knights have never been long on brains, you ask me. Biddy’s always going around gossiping about this and that, and Jack’s no better. Anybody who runs on at the mouth that way, you have to figure there’s no sense behind it.”
“That’s so.” Rokeby nodded vigorously, but not vigorously enough to disturb the greased perfection of his hair. “They would even talk to the Americans now and then, people say, in spite of what happened to their boy.”
“Really?” McGregor sucked on his pipe. “I have to tell you I hadn’t heard that.” Because he had to tell it to Rokeby didn’t make it true. As he’d calculated, Captain Hannebrink had been so interested in those new nails that he hadn’t thought buying new ones meant McGregor could get rid of old ones. And a farm was a big place. You could search it from now till doomsday and never find dynamite and fuse and blasting caps, even if they were there-which some of them, at any rate, weren’t, not any more. Some of the Yankees blown to hell and gone, the runny-mouthed Knights in hot water-very hot water, he hoped-with the occupying authorities…Two revenges at once wasn’t bad. “No, I hadn’t heard that,” McGregor repeated. “Too bad.”
Nellie Semphroch set fresh coffee in front of the Confederate colonel. “I do thank you, ma’am,” he said, courteous as the Rebs were most of the time. Once the words had passed his lips, though, he might have forgotten she existed. Turning back to the other officers at the table, he took up where he’d left off: “If we have to leave this town, we ought to treat it the way the Romans treated Carthage.”
The classical allusion meant nothing to Nellie. The officers to whom he was speaking understood it, though. “Leave no stone atop another?” a lieutenant-colonel said.
Another colonel nodded. “We’ll give the damnyankees a desert to come home to, not a capital. This place has been frowning down on the Confederacy as long as we’ve been independent.”
“Too right it has,” said the first colonel, the one to whom Nellie had given the new cup of coffee. “Let them rule from Philadelphia. Washington was a capital made before we saw how we were treated in that union.”
“Tyrants they were, tyrants they are, tyrants they shall ever be,” the second colonel agreed. “The White House, the Capitol, all the departments-dynamite them all, I say. The Yankees only maintained their presence here after the War of Secession to irk us.”
Nellie glanced over toward Edna, hoping her daughter was listening as the Rebel officers calmly discussed the destruction of the capital of the United States. Edna, however, was casting sheep’s eyes at Lieutenant Kincaid. Why should she care? Nellie thought bitterly. She’s got a Rebel officer for a fiance.
The lieutenant-colonel said, “Too bad about the Washington Monument. No matter what we did with the rest of the town, I would have left that standing. Washington was a Virginian, after all.”
“Fortunes of war,” the colonel said. “Can’t be helped-it was in the way of our barrage when the war started, and of the damnyankees’ fire once we forced an entrance into the city.”
“That sort of destruction is one thing,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “But deliberately wrecking the monuments as we retire may cost us Yankee retribution elsewhere.”
For a wonder, that made both colonels thoughtful. Before the war, the arrogant Rebs wouldn’t have worried about how the USA might respond to anything they did. Now-Now Nellie had a hard time holding on to her polite mask. Now they’d learned better.
Edna got up and filled Nicholas Kincaid’s coffee cup. She didn’t charge him, which annoyed Nellie but about which she could say nothing. She didn’t want Edna to marry the Confederate
lieutenant-she didn’t want Edna marrying any man-but she knew she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She consoled herself by thinking that marrying Kincaid might get Edna out of Washington before the United States battered their way back into the city. Had Nellie had some way of escaping the bloodbath that likely lay ahead, she would have taken it.
She did have a way to escape the coffeehouse, if only for a little while. “I’m going across the street to see Mr. Jacobs,” she said to Edna. “Take care of everybody while I’m gone, would you, dear?”
“All right, Ma,” Edna said sulkily. She no doubt suspected that her mother wanted to keep her from spending so much time with Nicholas Kincaid. She was right, too, but she couldn’t do anything about it.
The bell above Jacobs’ door jangled when Nellie came in. The cobbler looked up from the boot he was resoling. “Why, hello, Nellie,” he said, as if his fondest wish had just been realized. “How good to see you this morning.”
“Good to see you, too, Hal,” Nellie said, a little stiffly. She was still nervous about having let him kiss her once, and even more nervous about having liked it. But that didn’t matter, or didn’t matter much. Business was business, and wouldn’t keep. “You remember how I told you not so long ago that the Rebs would do anything to try and hang onto Washington, on account of they reckoned it was their capital by rights, and not ours?”
“Yes, of course I remember that,” Jacobs said, peering at her through his spectacles. Then he took them off, blinked a couple of times as he set them on the counter, and looked up at her again. He smiled. “That’s better.”
Nellie said, “I think they’re starting to get the idea they can’t keep Washington no matter what they do. The USA won’t get it back in one piece, sounds like.” She told the shoemaker what the Confederate officers had been discussing in the coffeehouse.
Jacobs clucked reproachfully. “This is foolish wickedness,” he said. “No other word for it, Widow Sem-Nellie. I promise you, I will make certain it is known, if you happen to be the first to have heard of it. Your country owes you a great debt if we can use this knowledge to keep the CSA from carrying out such a vile scheme.”
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