The Victorious Opposition (46 page)

These days, Mary would gladly have allied with the Devil against the United States. Only trouble was, Old Scratch appeared uninterested in the deal—or maybe he’d taken up residence in Philadelphia. As for her country, it remained subjugated. She saw no grand uprising on the horizon. The Canadians had tried that once: tried, failed, and seemed to decide not to repeat the experiment.

That left Mary furious. She wanted to be part of something bigger than herself, something more than a rebellion of one. Other people made bombs, too, and made more of them; she read and heard about the bangs every so often, and had the feeling the papers and wireless didn’t talk about all of them. The others attacked real soldiers and administrators, too, the way her father had. They didn’t limit themselves to a Greek who’d come up to Canada to run a general store.

Mary looked up toward the heavens and asked God, or perhaps her father,
Well, what else could I do?
Other parts of life had got in the way of her thirst for revenge. One of those other parts was working in the diner across the street. Another was sleeping in the crib. She knew next to nothing about the people who planted other bombs, but she would have bet they didn’t have babies to worry about.

Local stories filled most of the
Register
’s pages: local stories and local advertising. The wedding announcements and obituaries were as stylized as the serials that ran ahead of main features on the cinema screen. If you’d seen one, you’d seen them all; only names and dates changed.

As for the ads, many of those were even more formulaic than the announcements. Peter Karamanlides bought space to plug his store every week. So did Dr. Shipley, the painless dentist. Mary often wondered why, when they had the only general store and dentist’s office for miles around. The same applied to the laundry and the haberdasher and to the newspaper itself. If you didn’t use their services, whose would you use?

Advertisements from farmers often followed formulas, too. Those for stud services did:
offspring to stand and walk
was the stock phrase. If the offspring did, fine; if not, the stud fee had to be refunded. But some of those ads were different. There was no standard format, for instance, for selling a piano.

There was no formula for the little stories speckled through the inner pages of the
Rosenfeld Register
, either. The editor, no doubt, would have called them “human interest” pieces. Mary sometimes wondered about the sanity of any human being who was interested in stories about a two-headed calf nursed by two different cows or a man who pulled a boxcar with his teeth—and false teeth, at that.

But she looked at the filler pieces herself. A story about a mother cat nursing an orphaned puppy could make her smile. So could one about two former sweethearts who’d both moved away from the small town where they grew up, then didn’t see each other for twenty-five years till they were standing in line at the same Toronto cinema. One had never married; the other was a widower. They’d fallen in love all over again.

Some of those “human interest” stories made Mary grit her teeth, because propaganda poisoned them. The one about the Yank flier who’d requalified as a fighter pilot after twenty years away from aeroplanes was particularly sappy; she had to resist the impulse to crumple up the
Register
and throw it across the living room. The last paragraph said,
Our bold hero, now also a successful barrister specializing in occupation affairs, is married to the former Laura Secord, a descendant of the “Paul Revere of Canada,” who had the same name. They have one daughter. Thus we see that the two lands are becoming ever more closely intertwined.

Mary saw nothing of the sort. What she saw was a traitor living high on the hog because she’d married a Yank. And hadn’t Laura Secord been one of the people who’d betrayed the uprising in the 1920s? Mary nodded to herself. She was sure she remembered that. She wouldn’t forget the name, not when she’d learned it in school before the Yanks started changing what was taught. Had the woman been intertwined with this Yank flier even then? The lewd image was enough to make Mary’s cheeks heat.

She’d promised herself vengeance on the people who’d made the uprising fail. She’d promised, and then she hadn’t delivered. Her father would have been ashamed of her. Up there in heaven, Arthur McGregor probably
was
ashamed of her.

“I’ll take care of it,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of it if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Then she had to take care of something else, because Alec woke up with a yell: “Pooping potty!” That was his signal that he needed to use the toilet—or, sometimes, that he’d just gone. Mary rushed in to lift him out of the crib and see which it was this time.

“You’re dry!” she exclaimed in glad surprise after a hasty check—he did have accidents in his sleep.

“Dry as a fly,” he answered, echoing one of the things she said to him.

“What a good boy!” Mary took him out of the crib, gave him a kiss, and stood him on a stool in front of the toilet. He did his business, and almost all of it went where it was supposed to go. Mary cleaned up the rest with toilet paper. “What a good boy!” she said again. Another woman in the block of flats insisted babies didn’t turn into people till they were toilet-trained. Mary thought that went too far . . . most of the time.

His clothes set to rights, Alec went off to play. Mary went off to keep at least one eye on him while he was playing, to make sure he didn’t knock over a table or pull a lamp down on his head or try to swallow a big mouthful of dust or stick his finger in an electric socket or do any of the other interesting and creative things small children did in their unending effort not to live to grow up.

This afternoon, he made a beeline for the ashtray. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Mary said, and got there first. He’d tried that before. Once, he’d managed to swallow one of Mort’s cigarette butts, as he’d proved by puking it up. Keeping an eye on her son, Mary understood how her mother had come to have gray hair.

Every so often, she cast a longing glance across the street at the diner. When Mort got back, she’d have another pair of eyes in the flat to keep watch on Alec. One toddler left two parents only slightly outnumbered. Dealing with Alec by herself, Mary often felt not just outnumbered but overwhelmed.

But when Mort did come home, he sank down into the rocking chair with a bottle of Moosehead and complained about how busy he’d been all day at the diner. “Lord, it’s good to get off my feet,” he said.

“I have the same feeling when Alec takes a nap,” Mary said pointedly.

Her husband didn’t take the point. “It was a madhouse over there today,” he said. “We made good money, but they kept us hopping.”

“Alec always keeps me hopping,” Mary said.

“This little fellow? This little fellow here?” Mort grabbed Alec and stuck him on his lap. Alec squealed with glee and cuddled up.
If I tried that, he’d pitch a fit. Either that or he’d just jump off ten seconds later,
Mary thought. Mort ruffled the toddler’s fine sandy hair. “You’re not so tough, are you?”

“Tough!” Alec yelled gleefully. “Tough!”

“You’re not so tough,” Mort said again, and turned him upside down. Alec squealed in delight. Mary hid a sigh by turning away. Mort could do things with their son that she couldn’t. She’d seen that very early on. He could get Alec to pay attention and do what he was told when she couldn’t. Maybe it was just that he had a deep, rumbling man’s voice. Maybe it was that he was gone more and Alec wanted to please him while he was around. Whatever it was, it was unquestionably real.

So was Laura Secord’s treason.
Alec has his father,
Mary thought.
I made a promise to mine a long time ago. I haven’t kept it yet, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Oh, no. It doesn’t mean that at all.
She nodded to herself. Then she smiled. She wasn’t annoyed at Mort any more, not even a little bit.

C
onscripts were filling out the ranks of the Confederate Army. It got stronger week by week. Confederate aeroplanes carried guns and bombs. The fastest Confederate fighters could go up against anything the USA built. And the United States, while they’d grumbled, hadn’t done anything
but
grumble. As far as Clarence Potter was concerned, that would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.

Jake Featherston had thought it would work like this. If it hadn’t, whether Featherston got—extorted—the right to run for a second term wouldn’t have mattered a hill of beans’ worth. The country would have thrown him out on his ear if the USA didn’t take care of the job.

The Confederate States were ever so much stronger than they had been. Potter knew just how strong they were—and how strong the United States were. A fight would have been no contest. But no fight came. Featherston had been sure none would. And he’d been right.

“By God, he’s earned a second term for that,” Potter muttered at his desk down below the War Department building.

He shook his head in something halfway between bemusement and horror.
Did I say that? Did
I
say that?
he wondered.
By God, I did. I meant it, too.
He’d spent more than fifteen years as one of Jake Featherston’s sincerest enemies—sincerest, because he’d known Featherston longer and better than any of the other people who couldn’t stand him. And now he had to admit Jake had known what he was doing after all.

Potter wouldn’t have dreamt the USA would sit quiet and let the CSA rearm. He would have thought—hell, he
had
thought—you’d have to be crazy to take a chance like that. Featherston had taken the chance, and he’d got away with it.

So what did that make him? A crazy man saw things nobody else could see. But what about someone who saw things nobody else could see—but that turned out to be there after all? There was a word for people like that, too. The word was
genius
. Potter didn’t like using that word about Jake Featherston. He still remembered the weight of the revolver he’d carried up to the Olympic swimming stadium, intending to get rid of Jake once for all.

But he hadn’t. He’d got rid of the colored would-be assassin instead, and the whole world was different on account of it. He looked down at his butternut uniform. He wouldn’t have put that on again, not in a million years.

Here he sat, analyzing reports from Confederates in the USA who talked as if they’d grown up there. The reports, of course, weren’t addressed
WAR DEPARTMENT, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, CSA
. Somehow, that might have made even the sleepy United States open eyes wide and perhaps raise an eyebrow. Instead, the letters and telegrams had come to a variety of businesses scattered all over the Confederate States. They were all coded, too, so they didn’t talk directly about barrels or aeroplanes. Not all the codes were particularly subtle, but they’d defeat casual snoopers.

Potter wished the reports could come straight to him. As things were, he got them anywhere from several hours to several days after they reached the CSA. As long as the United States and Confederate States stayed at peace, the delay didn’t matter too much. If they ever went to war . . .

He laughed at himself. If the USA and the CSA went to war again, the only way letters and telegrams crossed the border would be through the International Red Cross. He suspected—no, he knew—they would be a lot slower than they were now.

He drummed his fingers on the desk, took off his spectacles and carefully polished them, replaced them on his nose, and then did some more drumming. However much he despised the USA, he hoped another war wouldn’t come. The Confederacy would be fighting out of its weight, and all the more so because the United States had no second front against Canada this time.

Did Jake Featherston see that? It seemed pretty plain to Potter. As far as he could tell from cautious conversations, it seemed pretty plain to most of the officers in the War Department. The trouble was, of course, that Featherston wasn’t an officer, and never had been one. He was a jumped-up sergeant, remarkably shrewd, but not trained to look at the big picture. How much would that matter? If it really came to another fight, the president would surely be shrewd enough to let trained commanders take charge of things.

Potter’s musings were interrupted when a uniformed officer—not a soldier, he realized after a moment, but a Freedom Party guard—strode up to his desk, saluted, and barked out, “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Potter echoed in more crisply military tones. “And what can I do for you, ah, Chief Assault Leader?” The other officer wore a captain’s three bars on either side of his collar, but Party guards had their own titles of rank. Potter didn’t know if they thought the Army’s weren’t good enough for them, or if they thought those were too good. It wasn’t the sort of question he could ask, not if he wanted to keep wearing his uniform and not one with a big P stenciled on the back.

“Sir, I am ordered to bring you to the president at once,” the chief assault leader answered.

“Ordered, are you? Well, then, you’d better do it, eh?” Potter said, pushing back his chair and stowing papers in a drawer that locked. The Freedom Party guard nodded seriously. Clarence Potter didn’t smile. He’d been pretty sure a man who became a Party guard wouldn’t recognize irony if it piddled on his shiny black boots. He asked, “Do you know what this is about?”

“No, sir,” the officer said. “I have my orders. A motorcar is waiting outside.” He turned and marched, machinelike, toward the stairs. Potter followed at a more human amble.

The motorcar was a Birmingham painted butternut. It flew a Freedom Party flag, though, not the Confederate battle flag an Army vehicle would have sported. Potter and the stone-faced chief assault leader got in. The driver, also a Freedom Party guard, whisked them away from the War Department and up Shockoe Hill to the presidential residence.

A bodyguard there relieved Potter of his pistol. That was routine these days. If the guard knew Potter had once carried a pistol intending to use it on the president, he gave no sign.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Potter said when the captain—no, the chief assault leader—took him into Featherston’s office. Formality helped. If he spoke to the president of the CSA, he wouldn’t have to think—so much—about the fiery, foul-mouthed artillery sergeant he’d known during the war, wouldn’t have to think that the sergeant and the president were one and the same.