Blood and Iron (5 page)

Laughing still, Commander Grady clapped him on the back. “Cheer up. It won’t be so bad. You’ll still mess forward and bunk aft. And a five-inch gun is a five-inch gun.” He pointed to the sponson under that unbelievably long, unbelievably level deck. “You’ll do your job, and the flyboys will do theirs, and everybody will be happy except the poor enemy bastards who bump into us.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said dubiously. “What the devil did she start out to be, anyway? And why didn’t she turn out to be whatever that was?”

“They started to build her as a fast, light-armored battle cruiser, to slide in close to the Confederate coast, blast hell out of it, and then scoot before the Rebs could do anything about it—a monitor with legs, you might say,” Grady answered. “But that idea never went anywhere. Some bright boy got to thinking how handy it would be to take aeroplanes along wherever you needed them, and…there’s the
Remembrance
.”

“I thought of that myself, after the
Dakota
got bombed off Argentina,” Carsten said, “but I never imagined—this.” He wondered if he’d get into fights because sailors on ordinary, respectable vessels would call the
Remembrance
the ugliest ship in the Navy. Dammit, she
was
the ugliest ship in the Navy.

“Come on, let’s go aboard,” Grady said. “She won’t look anywhere near so strange from the inside.”

Even that didn’t turn out to be true. The hangars that held nearly three dozen fighting scouts and the supply and maintenance areas that went with them took up an ungodly amount of space, leaving the bunkrooms cramped and feeling like afterthoughts. As a petty officer, Carsten did get a bottom bunk, but the middle one in the three-tier metal structure was only a few inches above him. He could stand it, but he didn’t love it.

The only place in which he did feel at home was the sponson. The five-inch gun was the same model he’d served on the
Dakota
, and the sponson itself might have been transferred bodily from the battleship. The chief gunner’s mate in charge of the crew, a burly veteran named Willie Moore, wore a splendid gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He wasn’t half brother to his counterpart from the
Dakota
, Hiram Kidde, but Sam couldn’t have proved it by the way he acted.

He turned out to know Kidde, which surprised Sam not at all. “If you served with the ‘Cap’n,’ reckon you’ll do for me,” he rumbled when Carsten mentioned the name of his former gun commander a couple of days after coming aboard.

“Thanks, Chief. Hope so,” Sam said, and punctuated that with a sneeze. “Damn. I’m coming down with a cold.”

He was off his feed at supper that evening, which surprised him: the
Remembrance
, however ugly she was, boasted a first-class galley. Everything was fresh, too—an advantage of sitting in port. But Sam didn’t realize how sick he was till the next morning, when he almost fell out of his bunk. He stood, swaying, in front of it.

“You all right?” asked George Moerlein, who slept just above him. Sam didn’t answer; he had trouble figuring out what the words meant. Moerlein peered at him, touched his forehead, and then jerked back his hand as if he’d tried picking up a live coal. “We better get this guy to sick bay,” he said. “I think he’s got the influenza.” Sam didn’t argue, either. He couldn’t. He let them lead him away.

Arthur McGregor took a certain somber satisfaction in listening to the wind howl around his farmhouse. That was just as well; the wind in Manitoba was going to howl through the winter whether he took any satisfaction in it or not.

“One thing,” he said to his wife. “In weather like this, the Yanks stay indoors.”

“I wish to heaven they’d stayed in their own country,” Maude answered. She was short and redheaded, a contrast to his rangy inches and dark hair that was beginning to show frost as he edged into his forties.

Her eyes went to the photograph of their son, Alexander, that hung on the wall of the front room. The photograph was all they had of him; the U.S. troops who occupied Manitoba had executed him for plotting sabotage a year and a half before.

McGregor’s eyes went there, too. He was still paying the Americans back for what they’d done to Alexander. He would never be done paying them back, as long as he lived. If they ever found out he made bombs, he wouldn’t live long. He couldn’t drive the Yanks out of Canada singlehanded. If they were going to try to rule his country, though, he could make their lives miserable.

Julia came in from the kitchen. She also looked toward Alexander; these days, the family almost made a ritual of it. McGregor looked at his daughter in what was as close to wonderment as his solid, stolid nature could produce. Some time while he wasn’t looking, Julia had turned into a woman. She’d been eleven when the Americans invaded, and hardly even coltish. She was fourteen now, and not coltish any more. She looked like her mother, but taller and leaner, as McGregor himself was.

“What are you going to do about that school order, Pa?” she asked.

The wind gusted louder. McGregor could have pretended not to hear her. His own sigh was gusty, too. “I’m going to pretend I don’t know the first thing about it for as long as I can,” he answered.

He’d pulled Julia and her younger sister, Mary, out of school a couple of years before. The Americans were using it to teach Canadian children their lies about the way the world worked. Since then, McGregor and Maude had taught reading and ciphering at home.

Now, though, the occupying authorities had sent out an edict requiring all children between the ages of six and sixteen to attend school at least six months out of the year. They didn’t intend to miss any chances to tell their stories to people they wanted to grow up to be Americans, not Canadians.

“It’ll be all right, Pa,” Julia said. “I really think it will. You can send Mary and me, and we won’t end up Yanks, truly we won’t.” She looked toward Alexander’s photograph again.

“I know you won’t, chick,” he said. “But I don’t know that Mary would be able to keep from telling the teacher what she really thinks.”

At nine, Mary wore her heart on her sleeve, even more than Alexander had. She also hated Americans with a pure, clear hatred that made even her father’s pale beside it. Letting the Yanks know how she felt struck McGregor as most unwise.

Julia had washed the supper dishes; Mary was drying them. After the last one clattered into the cupboard, she came out to join the rest of the family. She was sprouting up, too, like wheat after planting. She would, McGregor judged, make a tall woman. But she still kept some of the feline grace she’d had since she was very small, and also some of a cat’s self-containment. McGregor hadn’t needed to teach her much about conspiracy. She understood it as if by instinct.

Now he said, “Mary, if you have to, do you suppose you can put up with listening to the Yanks’ lies in school without telling them off?”

“Why would I have to do that, Pa?” she answered. “Maybe they can make me go to school, but—” She caught herself. Her gray eyes, so like those of her father and her dead brother, widened. “Oh. You mean put up with them so I wouldn’t get in trouble—so
we
wouldn’t get in trouble.”

“That’s right.” Arthur McGregor nodded. No, no one needed to teach Mary about conspiracy.

She thought it over. “If I have to, I suppose I could,” she said at last. “But telling lies is a sin on their heads, isn’t it?”

“So it is.” McGregor smiled to hear that, but not too much: he’d passed his own stern Presbyterian ethic down to the new generation. “The Yanks have so many other sins on the book against them, though, that lying doesn’t look like so much to them.”

“Well, it should,” Mary said. “It should all count against them, every bit of it. And it will. God counts
everything
.” She spoke with great assurance.

McGregor wished he felt so sure himself. He believed, yes, but he’d lost that simple certainty. If he’d had any left, Alexander’s death would have burned it out of him, leaving ashes behind. He said, “You will go to school, then, and be a good little parrot, so we can show the Americans we’re obeying their law?”

His younger daughter sighed. “If I have to,” she said again.

“Good,” McGregor said. “The more we look like we’re doing what they want us to, the more we can do what we want to when they aren’t looking.”

Julia said, “That’s good, Pa. That’s very good. That’s just what we’ll do.”

“That’s what we’ll have to do,” Maude said. “That’s what everyone will have to do, for however long it takes till we’re free again.”

“Or till we turn into Americans,” Arthur McGregor said bleakly. He held up a work-roughened hand. “No, I don’t mean us. Some of our neighbors will turn into Americans, but not us.”

“Some of our neighbors have already turned into Americans,” Julia said. “They don’t care about what they were, so they don’t care what they are. We know better. We’re Canadians. We’ll always be Canadians. Always.”

McGregor wondered if, with the strongest will in the world, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would remember they were Canadians. And then, perhaps wondering the same thing, Maude spoke as if to reassure herself: “Germany took Alsace and Lorraine away from France almost fifty years ago, but the people there still remember they’re Frenchmen.”

Canadians had heard a great deal about their ally’s grievances against the Kaiser and his henchmen (till the Americans overran them, after which they’d had to endure lies about Germany’s grievances against France). Now France had more reasons to grieve, for the Germans were biting off more of her land. And McGregor, still in his bleak mood, said, “The Germans settled a lot of their own people in Alsace and Lorraine to help hold them down. If the Americans did that…”

His wife and daughters stared at him in horror. Mary spoke first: “I wouldn’t live next to Americans, Pa! I wouldn’t. If they came here, I’d…I don’t know what I’d do, but it’d be pretty bad.”

“We won’t have to worry about that till next spring at the earliest,” McGregor said. “Won’t be any Yanks settling down to farm in the middle of winter, not here in Manitoba there won’t.” His chuckle was grim. “And the ones who come in the spring, if any do, they’re liable to turn up their toes when they find out what winters are like. We’ve seen that the Americans don’t fancy our weather.”

“Too bad for them,” Julia said.

After the children had gone to sleep, McGregor lay awake beside his wife in the bed the two of them shared. “What am I going to do, Maude?” he whispered, his voice barely audible through the whistling wind. “By myself, I can hurt the Americans, but that’s all I can do. They won’t leave on account of me.”

“You’ve made them pay,” Maude said. He’d never admitted making bombs, not in so many words. She’d never asked, not in so many words. She knew. He knew she knew. But they formally kept the secret, even from each other.

“Not enough,” he said now. “Nothing could ever be enough except driving them out of Canada. But no one man can do that.”

“No one man can,” Maude said in a musing tone of voice.

He understood where she was going, and shook his head. “One man can keep a secret. Maybe two can. And maybe three can, but only if two of them are dead.” That came from the pen of Benjamin Franklin, an American, but McGregor had forgotten where he’d first run across it.

“I suppose you’re right,” Maude said. “It seems a pity, though.”

“If Alexander hadn’t hung around with a pack of damnfool kids who didn’t have anything better to do than run their mouths and make foolish plots, he’d still be alive today,” McGregor said harshly.

Maude caught her breath. “I see what you’re saying,” she answered after a long pause.

“And the strange thing is, if he was still alive, we wouldn’t hate the Yanks the way we do,” McGregor said. “They caused themselves more harm shooting him than he ever would have given them if they’d let him go.”

“They’re fools,” Maude said. That McGregor agreed with wholeheartedly. But the American fools ruled Canada today. God must have loved them, for He’d made so very many.

The notion of God loving Americans was so unlikely, McGregor snorted and fell asleep bemused by it. When he woke up, it was still dark; December nights fifty miles south of Winnipeg were long. He groped for a match, scraped it alight, and lit the kerosene lamp on the nightstand.

He didn’t want to get out from under the thick wool blankets: he could see his own breath inside the bedroom. He threw a shirt and overalls over his long johns and was still shivering. Maude got out of bed, too. She carried the lamp downstairs as soon as she was dressed. He followed her.

She built up the fire in the stove and started a pot of coffee. It wasn’t good coffee; if the Americans had any good coffee, they kept it for themselves. But it was hot. He stood by the stove, too, soaking in the warmth radiating from the black iron. Maude melted butter in a frying pan and put in three eggs. McGregor ate them along with bread and butter. Then he shrugged on a long, heavy coat and donned mittens. Reluctantly, he opened the door and went outside.

It had been cold in the bedroom. As he slogged his way to the barn, he wondered if he would turn into an icicle before he got there. A wry chuckle made a fogbank swirl around his face for a moment, till the fierce wind blew it away. People said there wasn’t so much work on a farm in winter. In a way, they were right, for he didn’t have to go out to the fields.

In spring and summer, though, he didn’t have to work in weather like this. The body heat of the livestock kept the barn warmer than the weather outside, but warmer wasn’t warm. He fed the horse and cow and pigs and chickens and cleaned up their filth. By the time he was done with that, he was warmer, too.

His eye fell on an old wagon wheel, the sort of junk any barn accumulated. Under it, hidden in a hole beneath a board beneath dirt, lay dynamite and fuses and blasting caps and crimpers and other tools of the bomb-maker’s art. McGregor nodded to them. They would come out again.

Rain, some of it freezing, poured down out of a bleak gray sky. A barrel rumbled across the muddy Kansas prairie toward Colonel Irving Morrell. The cannon projecting from its slightly projecting prow was aimed straight at him. Two machine guns projected from each side of the riveted steel hull; two more covered the rear. A pair of White truck engines powered the traveling fortress. Stinking, steaming exhaust belched from the twin pipes.