American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  That’s silly, Mary thought. We didn’t. Not even close. All we did was talk about that stump. To her mother, that stump seemed plenty. And Mary herself wasn’t inclined to change her mind. Maybe that was what worried her mother.

  They were still wary around each other a few days later, when they had to go into Rosenfeld to shop. Mary remembered checkpoints outside of town, where the Americans would carefully examine wagons and goods for explosives before letting them go on. Not now. The Yanks seemed to think her countrymen weren’t dangerous any more. One day, she hoped to show them they were wrong. That too, though, would have to wait for another day.

  Many more motorcars were on the road now than had been there when Mary first started going into Rosenfeld. They whizzed past the wagon, one after another. Some of the drivers, angry because they had to slow down to keep from hitting it, honked as they went by.

  “I wish I were a man,” Mary said. “I’d tell them what I think of them.”

  Her mother nodded. “Yes, I’m sure you would,” she said. It did not sound like praise. Mary muttered to herself, but didn’t rise to it.

  When they got into Rosenfeld, her mother tied the horse to a lamppost. “Hardly any hitching rails left,” Mary said.

  “I know.” Maude McGregor nodded again. “Automobiles don’t need them. You go to the post office and get some stamps. I’ll be in Henry Gibbon’s store.”

  “All right.” Mary hesitated, then plunged: “Do you want to go to the cinema afterwards? We haven’t been in an awfully long time.”

  “Maybe,” her mother answered. “We’ll see how much I have to spend at the general store, that’s all.”

  Mary wished she could argue more, but knew she couldn’t, not when the argument involved money. Even the half a dollar two tickets would cost was a lot, considering how little the farm brought in.

  Wilfred Rokeby stood behind the counter at the post office, as he had for as long as Mary could remember. She noticed with surprise that he’d gone gray. When had that happened? It must have sneaked up when she wasn’t looking. He still parted his hair in the middle and slicked it down with some old-fashioned, sweet-smelling oil whose spicy odor she indelibly associated with the post office.

  Only one other customer was ahead of her: a young man close to her own age, who had a huge swarm of parcels. The postmaster had to weigh each one individually and calculate the proper postage for it, then stick on stamps and write down the sum so he could get a grand total when he finally finished.

  Seeing Mary, the young man waved her forward. “If you want to take care of what you need, go ahead,” he told her. “I’ll be here for a while any which way.”

  She shook her head. “It’s all right. You were here first. I can wait.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Positive,” she said. “Where are you sending all those boxes, anyway?”

  “Winnipeg. My brother just moved up there, and he figured out this was the cheapest way to get his stuff up there with him. Of course, that means I have to stand here and go through this, but why should Bob care?” He grinned.

  To her surprise, Mary found herself grinning, too. “Brothers and sisters are like that,” she said, speaking from experience. “You might as well be a pack mule, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “That’s right. That’s just right.” Bob’s brother—Mary still had no better name for him—nodded enthusiastically. “They always say they’ll pay you back, and then they never do, or not enough.” He paused to stoop and hand Wilfred Rokeby another package.

  “Thank you, Mort,” the postmaster said.

  As if hearing his name reminded him Mary didn’t know it, he said, “That’s me—Mort Pomeroy, at your service.” He touched the brim of his hat.

  “Oh!” Mary said. She hadn’t seen him before, or at least hadn’t noticed him, but now she knew who his family was. “Your father runs the diner down the street from Gibbon’s general store.” With money so tight, she couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten there.

  “That’s me,” he said again, and handed another package, a big, heavy one, to Rokeby. Then he turned back to her. “That’s me, all right, but who are you?” He looked at her as if he were an explorer who’d just sighted a new and unimagined continent.

  “I’m Mary McGregor.” She waited.

  “Oh,” Mort Pomeroy said, in a tone very different from hers. He couldn’t go on with something bright and chipper, as she had, something on the order of, Your father blew up Yanks. Then he blew himself up, too. He couldn’t say anything like that, but his face told her he knew who her father was, sure enough. Who in and around Rosenfeld didn’t know who Arthur McGregor was?

  Too bad, she thought. Now he won’t want to have anything to do with me, and he seems nice.

  But, after giving Wilfred Rokeby yet another parcel—the next to last one—he managed to put the smile back on his face and say, “Well, that was a long time ago now, and it certainly didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  He wasn’t quite right. The only thing Mary regretted was that her father hadn’t had more luck. But Pomeroy wouldn’t know that, of course. And a lot of people in Rosenfeld still stared and pointed whenever she went by, and probably would for years to come. Someone trying to treat her kindly made a very pleasant novelty, especially when the someone in question was a good-looking young man. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “For what?” He sounded honestly puzzled as he gave the postmaster the last package. That made her like him more, not less.

  Rokeby went to work with pencil and paper. “Comes to nine dollars and sixteen cents, all told,” he said.

  “For postage? Can you imagine that?” Mort Pomeroy said, genially astonished, as he paid Rokeby. “I’ll take it out of Bob’s hide—if he ever finds a job, I will.”

  “Times are hard,” Mary agreed. “Let me have seventy-five cents’ worth of stamps, Mr. Rokeby, if you would.”

  “I can do that,” he said, and gave her twenty-five stamps—postage had recently gone up from two cents to three. He put the three quarters she handed him into his cash box. She sighed. The extra twenty-five cents she had to spend on stamps would have paid her way into the theater. Now the money was gone—and gone into the Americans’ pockets. One more reason to hate them, she thought.

  “Are you in town by yourself?” Pomeroy sounded hopeful.

  “I have to meet my mother at the general store,” Mary said with much more regret than she’d expected to feel.

  His face fell. “Oh. Too bad.” He hesitated, then asked, “If I was to come calling on you one day before too long, would that be all right? Maybe you’d like to see a moving-picture show with me?”

  “Maybe I would.” Mary realized she ought to say more than that. “Yes, I’m sure I would.”

  “Swell!” Now the grin came back enormously. “I’ve got an auto. Can I pick you up Saturday night? We’ll go to a film, see what else there is to do after that—a dance at the church, or something.”

  “All . . . all right.” Mary sounded dazed, even to herself. No one had ever shown this kind of interest in her. Her past left her damaged goods. That had always suited her fine—up till this minute. She was ever so glad Mort Pomeroy didn’t seem to care who her father was or what he’d done. “Saturday night,” she whispered, and hurried out of the post office. Pomeroy and Wilfred Rokeby both stared after her.

  Cincinnatus Driver used a hand truck to haul crates of oatmeal boxes from his Ford to the market that had ordered them. “This here’s the last load, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, panting a little.

  Oscar Marlowe nodded. “Yes, I’ve been keeping track of everything you’ve brought in,” he answered. Cincinnatus believed him: the storekeeper was a thin, fussily precise man with a little hairline mustache so very narrow it might have been drawn on with a mascara pencil. He said, “I do appreciate how hard you’ve worked bringing it all in.”

  “It’s my job, Mr. Marlowe,” said Cincinnatus, who knew he woul
d feel it in his back and shoulders tonight. Work that had seemed effortlessly easy in his twenties didn’t now that he’d passed forty. He added, “Way things are these days, I got to do everything I can.”

  ’’Oh, yes.” Marlowe nodded. He ran a pink tongue over that scrawny little excuse for a mustache. “I understand you completely—and agree with you completely, I might add. Even now, though, too many people don’t seem to have figured that out. I’m always glad to see someone who has. Let me have your paperwork. The sooner I sign off, the sooner you can be on your way. I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “Got it right here.” Scipio handed him the clipboard.

  “I expected you would.” Marlowe scribbled his name on the forms, making sure he signed in all four necessary spaces. He and Cincinnatus leaned toward each other in mutual sympathy as he wrote. Their both being hardworking men counted for more than one’s being white, the other black. The storekeeper said, “Here you are,” and returned the clipboard to Cincinnatus.

  “Thank you kindly, suh.” Cincinnatus turned to leave.

  He’d taken only a step or two before Marlowe said, “Here, wait a second.” He went behind the counter where he kept his meat on ice, wrapped a package in butcher paper, and thrust it at Cincinnatus. “Take this home to your missus, why don’t you? Marrow bones and a little meat—make you a good soup or a stew.”

  Cincinnatus wanted to say he couldn’t possibly, but common sense won over pride. “Thank you kindly,” he repeated, and touched the brim of his hap. “You didn’t have to do nothin’ like that, Mr. Marlowe.”

  “I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to.” The storekeeper sounded impatient. “If you work hard, you ought to know other people notice. And I do. I’m always glad to see you bringing me loads from the docks and the railroad yard.”

  “Much obliged.” Cincinnatus touched his brim again, then took the package—it was nice and heavy—out to the truck and set it on the front seat beside him. He had one more delivery to make before he could go home with it.

  His last stop wasn’t at a grocery store, but at the offices of the Des Moines Register and Remembrance. The crates he unloaded there were large and heavy. “What is this thing?” he asked the man who took delivery.

  “New typesetting machine,” the fellow answered. “We’ll get the paper out faster than ever.”

  “That’s nice,” Cincinnatus said obligingly.

  “And we won’t need so many compositors,” the newspaperman added. Seeing that the word meant nothing to Cincinnatus, he chose a simpler one: “Typesetters.”

  “Oh.” Cincinnatus hesitated, then asked, “What happens to the ones you don’t need no—any—more? They lose their jobs?”

  “That isn’t settled yet.” The newspaperman sounded uncomfortable now. He sounded so uncomfortable, Cincinnatus was sure he was lying. He went on, “Even if we do let some people go, we’ll try to make sure they latch on somewhere else.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cincinnatus said. How were they supposed to manage that, with jobs so hard to come by? He figured it for another lie, right up there with old favorites like The check is in the mail.

  His skepticism must have shown in his voice; the man from the Register and Remembrance turned red. He said, “We’ll try, goddammit. We will. What else can we do? We’ve got to save money wherever we can, because we sure as hell aren’t making much.”

  For that, Cincinnatus had no good answer. He got his paperwork signed and went back to the truck. Outside the Register and Remembrance building, a couple of men were hanging a banner over the doorway. WIN WITH COOLIDGE IN ‘32! it said, and then, in smaller letters, A RETURN TO PROSPERITY! The Register and Remembrance was the Democratic paper in Des Moines. Its Socialist counterpart, the Workers’ Gazette, had its offices across the street and down the block. Even though this was a presidential-election year, the Workers’ Gazette displayed no banners extolling the virtues of Hosea Blackford. The paper seemed to want to forget about him.

  It was only May. There was, as yet, no guarantee Calvin Coolidge would be nominated for a second run at the Powel House. It certainly looked likely, though; no other Democratic hopeful roused much excitement. Cincinnatus snorted when that thought crossed his mind. Coolidge was about as exciting as a pitcher of warm spit. But everyone thought he could win when November rolled around. To the Democrats, locked out of Powel House the past twelve years, that was plenty to make the governor of Massachusetts seem exciting.

  Nobody, by all the signs, thought President Blackford had much chance to win a second term. But the Socialists had made no move to dump him from their ticket. For one thing, not even they were radical enough to jettison a sitting president. For another, no one else from the Socialist Party looked like a winner this year, either. Blackford wouldn’t run again, win or lose. If things went as they looked like going, he could perform one last duty for the Party by serving as sacrificial lamb. That way, defeat would taint no one else.

  Cincinnatus shrugged. Whom the Socialists ran was all one to him. He intended to vote Democratic; the Democrats took a harder line about the Confederate States than the Socialists did. He couldn’t imagine any Negro in the United States voting any other way—which didn’t mean some wouldn’t.

  When he got back to the family apartment, Elizabeth greeted him with, “How did it go today?” How much money did you make? was what she meant, of course.

  Some of the tension slid out of her face when he answered, “Pretty well, thanks. How about you, sweetheart?”

  “Ordinary kind o’ day,” his wife said with a weary shrug. “Got me two dollars and a quarter. Every little bit helps, I reckon.”

  Achilles looked up from the kitchen table, where he was writing a high-school composition. He said, “Classes let out next month. Then I’ll be able to look for work without you pitching fits, Dad.”

  He itched to do more than he was doing. Cincinnatus knew as much. He said, “Workin’ summers is one thing. Workin’ instead o’ schoolin’ is somethin’ else. You’re sixteen—you got two years to go ‘fore you get your diploma. I want you to have it, by God. It’s somethin’ nobody can’t never taken away from you.”

  By Achilles’ expression, he’d made a mess of his grammar. But then, at sixteen (and where had the years since he was born gone?) Achilles wore that look of scorn around him a lot of the time. Cincinnatus remembered wearing it around his own father when he was that age. Boys turning into young men banged heads with their fathers. That was the way things worked.

  “If we need the money—” Achilles began.

  “We don’t need it that bad,” Cincinnatus said. “This is the rest of your life we’re talkin’ about, remember.” To his relief, his son didn’t choose to push it tonight. Cincinnatus knew he’d be smart not to push the boy too hard about staying in school. Achilles liked school, and did pretty well. But if his father urged him to stay in and do well, that might be enough to turn him against it.

  Amanda came in and gave Cincinnatus a hug. She was still young enough to love without reservation. She said, “I got all my words right on my spelling test today.”

  “That’s good, sweetheart. That’s mighty fine,” Cincinnatus said enthusiastically. “Can’t hardly do no better than perfect.”

  “How can you do better than perfect at all?” Amanda asked.

  “You can’t. I was just jokin’ a little,” Cincinnatus answered.

  “Oh.” Amanda wrinkled her nose. “That’s silly, Daddy.” Her accent held even more Midwest, even less Kentucky, than Achilles’. She’d been born here, after all. Everyone she’d ever heard, except for her parents, had that harsh, precise way of talking, with sharp vowels and every letter of every word pronounced. It still sounded strange and ugly to Cincinnatus, although he’d been here for going on ten years (not counting time in Luther Bliss’ jail).

  A delicious odor reached Cincinnatus’ nose. “What smells good?” he asked.

  “I’m stewing giblets with potatoes and toma
toes and onions,” Elizabeth answered. “Butcher shop had ’em cheap.”

  “Cheap?” Cincinnatus said, thumping himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand. He hurried down to the truck and returned with the butcher-paper package he’d left on the front seat. “Soup bones. Oscar Marlowe gave ’em to me for nothin’. Reckon I’d forget my head if it wasn’t on tight.”

  “Soup bones? That’s wonderful! I’ll do ’em up tomorrow.” Elizabeth hurried to put the package in the icebox.

  “Giblets. Soup bones.” Achilles made a face that looked remarkably like the one his little sister had just made. “Not many people eat that kind of stuff.”

  Cincinnatus had grown up eating chicken gizzards and beef tongues and lungs and other cuts richer people thought of as offal. He took them for granted, as he always had. When times here in Des Moines were good, Elizabeth hadn’t bought them so often, so Achilles noticed them more now than he would have otherwise. But Cincinnatus wagged a finger at his son. “Happens that ain’t so,” he said. “Plenty of people who was eatin’ roast beef’s eatin’ giblets now, and glad to have ’em. I ain’t just talkin’ ‘bout colored folks, neither. It’s the same way with whites. I seen enough to know that for a fact. Reckon it’s the same with the Chinaman upstairs, too. When times are hard, you’re smart to be glad o’ what you’ve got, not sorry for what you ain’t.”

  Achilles said, “Somebody at school told me Chinamen cut up dogs and cats and use them for meat. Is that true, Dad?”

  “I don’t know,” Cincinnatus answered. “I never heard it before, I’ll tell you. Tell you somethin’ else, too—don’t you go asking the Changs about it, neither. They’re nice folks, and I don’t want you embarrassing ’em none, you hear?”