Blood and Iron (47 page)

“How about it, Hal?” Nellie asked. “Do you think you could have won the war for the United States?” After a moment, she went on, “As a matter of fact, you did go a long way toward winning the war for the USA, at least as far as Washington goes.”

Hal waved a hand. He was, Nellie had seen, as modest and self-deprecating a man as had ever been born. That had helped keep her from noticing his many good qualities for longer than she should have. He said, “For one thing, I had the very best of help, of which you were no small part.”

“Pooh!” Nellie said.

“Pooh!” Clara echoed. She gurgled and laughed, liking the sound she’d just imitated.

“Pooh!” Nellie repeated, which made Clara laugh again. Nellie continued, “I got a medal I didn’t especially deserve, and you deserved one and never got it.”

Hal Jacobs shrugged. “I know what I did. My country knows what I did. I do not need any medals. And besides, if anyone should have won a medal, it was Bill Reach. I was far from the only man who reported to him. He was the one who put everything together and got most of it out. I know you did not much like him, but it is very sad that he did not live to see our victory.”

“You’ve said that before,” Nellie replied, and dropped it there. She was the only person in the world who knew what had happened to Bill Reach, and she intended to take the secret to the grave with her. As far as she was concerned, he deserved everything she’d given him. But Hal still thought well of him, so she’d kept her own remarks to the fewest she could get away with.

“President Upton Sinclair.” Hal, to her relief, went back to the world turning upside down. He shrugged again. “It does not sound like a name that belongs to a president. Presidents are named John or Thomas or Andrew or Theodore. Upton?” He shook his head. “It sounds like a name for a butler, not a president.”

“Well, so it does,” Nellie said. “We’ve got four years to get used to it, though. By the time 1924 rolls around, it’ll seem natural enough.”

“I suppose it may,” Hal admitted. “By then, I hope the country will be sick of it, and will vote him out of office and put in a good Democrat with a nice, ordinary name.”

“Maybe it won’t be so bad.” Nellie slid a finger under the edge of Clara’s diaper. “Oh, good—you’re dry.” She sat down at the edge of the bed and began to bounce the baby gently up and down. “Come on, sweetheart, time for you to go to sleep.”

“Time for you to go to sleep so your mother and father can go to sleep,” Hal added. He yawned. “I had forgotten how much sleep you lose when a baby is small.”

“So had I,” Nellie said. “And the other thing is, I need sleep more now than I did when Edna was little. I’m not as young as I used to be, and boy, does Clara let me know it.” She glanced warily down at her daughter, whose eyelids were fighting a losing battle against sliding shut. “Shh. I think she is going to drop off.”

Only after Nellie had put the baby in the cradle that made the bedroom crowded did Hal say, “You are still young and beautiful to me, my dear Nellie. You always will be.”

“Pooh!” Nellie said once more. She knew why men talked that way: to get women to go to bed with them. Any woman who believed such blandishments was almost enough of a fool to deserve what she would assuredly get. So a hard lifetime of experience had taught Nellie. But living with and listening to Hal were giving her occasional second thoughts.

She was too tired to indulge in second thoughts now, or even first ones. She let herself collapse onto the bed. Had she lain there for even a couple of minutes, she would have fallen asleep without changing into nightclothes. She’d done that a couple of times, on days when Clara was teething or sick or just ornery. Falling asleep in a corset was impressive proof of what exhaustion could do.

Tonight, though, she decided she wanted to be free of lacing and steel rods. With a weary sigh, she got to her feet, took off her skirt and shirtwaist, and escaped from the corset. A wool flannel nightgown went over her like a friendly, comfortable tent. Hal put on not only a nightshirt only a bit shorter than her gown but also a wool nightcap with a tassel. No cold breezes would take him by surprise.

“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 Semphroch,” 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.”