"Good night," he said as he and Nellie crawled under the covers. "I hope little Clara will let us sleep till morning."
She did. She did more often than not these days, a blessed relief from the first few weeks after she'd come home from the hospital. Still, the nights when she didn't were appalling enough to make up for a lot of the ones when she did.
But she woke the next day so smiling and cheerful, Nellie smiled, too, even before she'd had breakfast or, more important, coffee. She gave Clara her breast. The baby was taking cereal these days, and other solid food as well, but still enjoyed starting the day at the same old stand.
Nellie changed her-she emphatically needed it now-slapped powder on her bottom with a puff, and took her downstairs after getting dressed herself. She let Clara crawl and toddle around while she built up the fire in the stove and got the first pot of coffee going. She and Hal and Edna would split that one; customers got what came afterwards.
"Quiet night, thank God," Edna said when she came down a few minutes later. Living across the hall from a baby wasn't that much different from living in the same room as one. Edna started toasting bread, and melted butter in a frying pan to do up eggs for herself and her mother and stepfather. In another pan, she fried ham steaks in bacon grease left over from the day before. Hal Jacobs came down in time to eat before anything got cold, but too late to keep Nellie and Edna from teasing him about dawdling.
He was about to go across the street and open up his shoemaker's establishment when a fancy motorcar pulled to a stop in front of the coffeehouse Nellie ran. The driver hurried to open the door for his passenger, a portly gentlemen of late middle years. The fellow headed for the coffeehouse door.
"Lord, Ma," Edna breathed, "will you look at that? It's the president. He's coming here again."
Nellie snatched up Clara, who howled in outrage at not getting the chance to eat the tasty-looking piece of dust she'd picked up. "Hush, you," Nellie whispered sternly, which did no good at all.
In came Theodore Roosevelt. "Good morning, Miss Sem-phroch," he said, bowing to Edna. He turned to Nellie. "And good morning to you, Mrs.-Jacobs. Ha! I got it right, by jingo!'" He looked pleased with himself. "Good morning to you, too, Mr. Jacobs," he told Hal. "You have a lovely daughter here. Congratulations."
"Thank you, your Excellency," Nellie and Hal said together. Hal went on, "A great shame the election went against you, sir."
"The people have spoken," Roosevelt said. "It's another case of what Austria told Russia after the Russians saved their bacon in 1848: 'We shall astonish the world by our ingratitude.' Astonish it they did, by not helping the Czar in the Crimean War. Now we have a similar example on our own side of the Atlantic. But the country will survive it-I have great faith in the United States-and I shall, too."
"What will you do?" Nellie asked.
"I don't precisely know," Roosevelt answered. "Hunt big game, perhaps, or fly an aeroplane-maybe I shall hunt big game from an aeroplane. That might be jolly. But it's not why I came here today."
Edna gave him a cup of coffee. "Why did you come today, sir?" she asked.
Today, Roosevelt was without bodyguards. No-Nellie corrected herself. Today, the guards had not come into the coffeehouse. A couple of them paced outside, watchdogs in homburgs and fedoras. Roosevelt reached into his waistcoat and pulled out a small, felt-covered box. "I have here a token of appreciation for the signal service Mr. Jacobs rendered his country during the late war. This is a Distinguished Service Medal-I pulled some strings to get the War Department to issue it, since Mr. Jacobs was not formally in the Army during the war. But they humored me in this matter: one of the few advantages of lame-duckhood I have as yet discovered."
Nellie clapped her hands together in delight. So did Edna. Hal Jacobs turned red. He said, "Mr. President, I thought I made it perfectly clear I wanted no special recognition for any small things I may have done."
"You did," Roosevelt said. "I'm ignoring you. There-another advantage of lame-duckhood: I don't have to listen to anyone if I don't feel like it, not any more. You'll take your medal and you'll be a hero, Mr. Jacobs, and if you don't happen to care for it. too bad. What do you think of that?"
"He thinks it's splendid!" Nellie exclaimed. Hal Jacobs gave her a dirty look. She didn't care. She didn't care a bit. If a wife couldn't speak for a husband when he needed speaking for, what good was she? None at all, as far as Nellie could see.
Arthur McGregor shooed a hen off her nest and grabbed the egg she had laid. The hen's furious squawks and flutterings said she was convinced he'd murdered part of her immediate family. She was right-he had, or would as soon as Maude got around to cooking the egg. McGregor had had a member of his immediate family murdered, too. It gave him some sympathy for the hen… but not enough to keep him from robbing her nest.
He slipped a china egg in there and let the hen return. She kept on fussing for a moment or two. Then she discovered the substitute. Her clucks changed from outrage to contentment. She settled down and began to brood an egg that would not hatch even on Judgment Day.
A scowl on his face, McGregor went on to the next nest. No one had given him any kind of substitute for Alexander. He wished he were as stupid as a chicken, so that a photograph might fool him into thinking he still had a son. Unfortunately, he knew better.
All he could hope for was revenge. The scowl grew deeper. "I couldn't even get that," he growled, knocking the next hen out of her nest with a backhand blow that almost broke her fool neck. She had no eggs in the nest, so he might as well have done her in.
"Dentures!" What a word to make into a curse! But if Custer hadn't broken his false teeth, he'd still have been sitting in Hy's when McGregor's bomb went off. As things were, McGregor had killed more than a dozen innocent people without getting the man he really wanted. He felt bad about that, and worse because they were all Canadians, victims of the U.S. occupation no less than he.
But Alexander had been innocent, and Alexander had been a victim, and nothing would ever bring him back to life. As far as McGregor was concerned, the war against the United States went on. Canadian forces might have surrendered (though rebellion did still simmer here and there, especially in parts of the Dominion the U.S. Army hadn't reached before the Great War ended). The mother country might have yielded. Arthur McGregor kept fighting, whenever he saw the chance.
He finished gathering the eggs and installing china pacifiers under the hens. As he headed back toward the farmhouse, he thought again how much easier life would have been had the U.S. issued him a china son, and had he been stupid enough to reckon it the same as the real thing.
Winter and reality slapped him in the face as soon as he left the barn. The wind cut like a knife. The sky was clear and blue, a blue that put him in mind of a bruise. If he stayed outside very long, he'd start turning blue, too. He'd never met a U.S. soldier who'd taken Manitoba winters in stride. The USA just didn't manufacture weather like this.
"So why the devil did the Yanks want to come up here and take this away from us?" he asked. The snarling wind blew his words away. That didn't matter. The question had no good answer, save that the Americans were as they were.
When he opened the kitchen door, the blast of heat from the stove was a blow hardly less than the one the freezing wind had given him. Where he'd been shivering an instant before, now sweat started out on his forehead. He shed his hat and heavy coat as fast as he could.
Maude looked up from the carrots she was peeling. "How many eggs have you got there?"
"Seven." McGregor looked in the basket. "No, I take it back- eight."
"Not bad," his wife said. He shrugged. He didn't want to look on the bright side of anything right now. Maude went on, "If things keep going the way they have been, we'll come through this winter in better shape than we have since before the war."
"We won't ever be in the kind of shape we were before the war," McGregor answered, his voice colder than the weather outside.
Maude bit her lip.
"You know what I mean," she said. He did, too. It didn't help. Had Alexander been there with him, a year where he didn't end up broke might not have looked so bad, even under U.S. occupation. As things were, every year showed a loss to him, even if he made money.
"If only-" he began, but he let that hang in the air. He still hadn't exactly told his wife about his bombs. She knew he'd gone to Winnipeg, of course, and she knew what had happened while he was there. But they both still pretended that was nothing but coincidence.
"You know the Culligans are putting on a dance next week if we don't get a blizzard between now and then, and maybe even if we do," Maude said.
"No, I didn't know." McGregor looked at her in some surprise. "You want to go dancing?" She hadn't shown any interest in that sort of thing since before the Great War. He shrugged. "If you do, I'll take you. I'll be switched if I think I remember the steps, though."
Maude shook her head. "I don't care one way or the other. But Julia and Ted Culligan have known each other since they were little, you know, and I think she'd enjoy dancing with him more than a bit."
"Do you?" McGregor made automatic protest: "But she's just a-" He stopped, feeling foolish. Julia wasn't just a baby any more. She'd be eighteen in a few weeks. He'd been engaged to Maude when she was eighteen. He coughed a couple of times. "I never paid any attention to Ted Culligan one way or the other. Does he matter that much to Julia?"
"He might," Maude said. "I don't know if she's serious, and I really don't know if he's serious-you men." McGregor only blinked at that blanket condemnation of his half of the human race. When he did nothing more, Maude shrugged and went on, "They could be serious, I think. We have to decide if we want them to be serious. The Culligans aren't bad folks."
"No, they're not. They mind their own business-they're not like any of the people who got Alexander into trouble." McGregor made up his mind. "All right, we'll go to this dance."
Go they did. It was snowing, but not hard. Julia chattered excitedly as McGregor drove the wagon toward the Culligans'. Mary chattered even more excitedly; it was her very first dance (actually, it wasn't quite, but she'd been too little to remember going to any of the others).
People had come from miles around, including the families of a couple of the boys who'd named Alexander as their fellow plotter. McGregor held his face still when he saw the McKier-nans and the Klimenkos. He'd been holding his face still for years. Doing it now wasn't that much harder than any other time.
Ted Culligan's ears stuck out. Other than that, he seemed a nice enough kid. He wasn't good enough for Julia; that was obvious. But it was also obvious no one else could be good enough for Julia, either.
A handful of American families had come up and taken over deserted farms around Rosenfeld. McGregor had wondered if the Culligans would invite them to the dance. Keeping his face still would have been harder then. But he didn't see them, and didn't hear any American accents, either.
A pair of fiddlers, a fellow with a concertina, and a man who pounded a drum with more enthusiasm than rhythm provided the music. The tunes were all old ones, and all safe ones. The little band stuck to love songs. McGregor would have loved to hear some of the regimental ballads he'd learned in the Army, but understood why the musicians fought shy of them; word would surely have got back to the U.S. authorities in town, which would have brought trouble on its heels.
McGregor danced a couple of dances with Maude. She did recall the steps better than he; he was content to let her lead. He noticed he wasn't the only farmer whose wife did the steering, either. That made him laugh, something he rarely did these days.
After those first few dances, McGregor was content to stand on the sidelines and drink punch. His eyebrows rose at the first taste of it. The Culligans hadn't stinted on the whiskey. A cup or two, and a man would think he could stay warm outside without coat and hat. He might even prove right. He was more likely to freeze to death.
Julia danced with other boys besides Ted Culligan. That helped ease McGregor's mind. His daughter was having a good time, which made him feel good. He danced a dance with Mary, whose head, he realized in surprise, came almost to the top of his shoulder. When had she grown so big?
There stood Julia, talking with Ted over a cup of the potent punch. Suddenly, McGregor didn't mind the weather at all. In the summertime, courting couples might slip out to a barn for a while. Doing that now invited frostbite, not romance.
McGregor shook hands with Ted Culligan's father when it was time to go home. He pretended not to see Ted kiss Julia on the cheek. That wasn't easy, not when she turned the color of a red-hot stove.
"I had a wonderful time," she said over and over on the drive back to the farm. "Simply wonderful." She was young enough to forget for a while what had happened to her family and her country, and to enjoy the moment. McGregor wished he could do the same.
Back at the farmhouse, he lit a lamp in the kitchen. His wife and daughters went yawning upstairs to bed. He brought the lamp outside and set it on the wagon while he unhitched the horse. Then he picked up the lamp again and carried it in his left hand while leading the horse to the barn.
He put the beast in its stall and started out of the barn again. But he stopped after a couple of steps: stopped and held the lantern high, peering around in all directions. No, he wasn't wrong. Someone had been in the barn while the McGregors were at the dance.
Fear and ftiry warred inside him. At first, fear was uppermost. Whoever had pawed through his things hadn't bothered trying to conceal his presence. Tools weren't where they should have been. A couple of drawers under McGregor's work table were open; he knew he'd left them closed, for he always did.
Heart hammering in his throat, he went over to the old wagon wheel beneath which he hid his bomb-making paraphernalia. Holding the lamp close, he tried to see if the snooper had tampered with it. As far as he could tell, it was undisturbed. His secret remained safe.
When he realized that, fury overtook fear. "God damn those sons of bitches," he said softly. "They do still figure I might be a bomber." He was, if anything, more indignant than if he'd been innocent. The Yanks had paid-no, the Yanks had seemed to pay-no attention to him the past couple of years. He'd thought they'd forgotten about him. He'd been wrong.
But they hadn't found anything. They'd have been waiting here for him if they had. "They're trying to rattle me," he murmured. "That's got to be it." They couldn't prove he'd planted bombs, so they were showing their cards, trying to force him into a mistake. He shook his head. He didn't intend to oblige them.
By the time he went back to the farmhouse and upstairs to his bedroom, Maude was sound asleep. He shrugged. Even if she'd been awake, he wouldn't have said a word. He got ready for bed himself.
Before the presidential election, a lot of firms had put printed messages in their workers' pay envelopes. The one Chester Martin got had read, If Upton Sinclair is elected on Tuesday, don't bother showing up for work Wednesday morning. The capitalists had tried to the very end to keep the proletariat from voting its conscience and its class interest.
They'd tried those games before, too, though not so aggressively: up till this election, they hadn't been so worried about losing. Well, they'd lost anyhow. Martin laughed every time he thought about it. Come March 4, it would be out with the old and in with the new, and the United States would have their first Socialist president. He could hardly wait.
Here it was late December, too, and he hadn't been fired. He didn't expect to be fired any time soon, either, not unless he hauled off and punched his foreman or something of that sort. His foreman was an idiot. Everyone on the foundry floor knew as much. The foreman's boss didn't, though, and his was the only opinion that mattered. But work went on as usual, in spite of there being a Socialist president-elect.
"Did you really expect anything different?" Albert Bauer asked when Martin remarked on that one day at the Socialist hall near the steelworks.
"I don't know that I expected anything different," Mar
tin answered. "I will say I wondered."
"Mystification," Bauer said scornfully. "That's all it is- nothing but mystification. The capitalists tried to intimidate us, and tried to make us believe they had the power to get away with intimidating us. It didn't work, and now they'll have to learn how to walk a lot smaller."
"Yeah," Martin said, and then, "How much do you think Sinclair will be able to do once he gets in?"
"Don't know," Bauer answered. "We've got a majority in the House, and I think the Socialists and Republicans and progressive Democrats make a majority in the Senate. The courts are full of reactionaries. They'll give us trouble."
"If they give too much trouble, we'll stop listening to them," Martin said. "Let's see them get their way if everybody ignores them. Or let's see them get their way if the worst reactionaries start having accidents."
Bauer laughed at him. "This from the man who used to be a Democrat? I've heard people who've been revolutionaries since before you were born who didn't sound half as fierce as you do."
"In for a penny, in for a pound," Chester Martin said, shrugging. "Besides, nobody who's been through the trenches is going to fuss about killing a judge or two. Once you've had practice, killing looks pretty easy."
"Something to that, I shouldn't wonder." Bauer looked thoughtful. "The capitalists might not have realized what they were doing when they started the war, but they helped create opponents who wouldn't back away from meeting force with force when they had to."
Martin nodded. "After artillery and poison gas and machine guns, cops are nothing special," he said, a thought he'd had before. He paused, then asked, "What do you think of this Freedom Party down in the CSA, Al? They're another bunch that doesn't seem like it's afraid of mixing things up with anybody they don't like."
"Reactionary maniacs," Bauer said with a toss of the head. "They want to turn back the clock to the way things were before the Great War. You can't turn back the clock, and you have to be a fool to think you can."
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