American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (41 page)

 
J
onathan Moss nodded to the military judge in front of him. “Sir, no matter what the occupation codes say about collusion and incitement, my client is not guilty. The prosecutor hasn’t introduced a single shred of evidence that Mr. Haynes either conspired against the United States, urged others to conspire or act against them, or, for that matter, acted against them himself in any way, shape, or form.”

  The judge, a grim-faced major named Daniel Royce, said, “Didn’t you spend three years fighting against the Canucks?”

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Moss answered. “Right around here, as a matter of fact.”

  “I thought as much,” Major Royce rumbled. “Why the devil are you defending them now, in that case?”

  “To make sure they get a fair shake, sir,” Moss said. “Plenty of people just want to jump on them with both feet now that they’re down. This conspiracy charge against my client is a case in point. It’s utterly groundless, as you can see.”

  “It is not!” yelped the military prosecutor, a captain surely too young to have fought in the Great War.

  “Look at the evidence, sir, not the allegations, and you’ll see for yourself,” Moss told Major Royce. He hadn’t lied to the judge. He did dislike seeing Americans swarming up into Ontario and ravaging the conquered province like so many locusts. But his reply hadn’t been the whole truth, either. What would Royce have said had he answered,
Because I fell in love with a Canadian
woman while my
squadron’s aerodrome was up by Arthur?
 The major looked to have been a formidable football player in his younger days. He would have drop-kicked Moss clean out of his courtroom.

  Scowling still, the military judge shuffled through the papers in front of him. He picked up one sheet and carefully read through it. Even from the back, Moss recognized it. It was a statement he’d got from his client’s neighbors, saying they’d never seen anyone visit Haynes’ house at a time when the prosecutor claimed he was shaping a plot there against the USA. His hopes leaped.

 
Bang!
 went Royce’s gavel. Everyone in the courtroom who’d seen combat started; the sudden noise was too much like a gunshot for comfort. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I find myself agreeing with the defense attorney here,” the military judge said. “I see no evidence of an offense against occupation regulations.

  Greed by people bringing the charges may be another matter. This case is dismissed. Keep your nose clean, Mr. Haynes, as you have been doing. You’re a free man.” The gavel banged again.

  “Thank you very much, your Lordship.” Paul Haynes sounded astonished that he wasn’t heading for prison.

  “I’m not a Lordship. You call me ‘your Honor,’ ” Judge Royce said. “No more Lordships here, and a good thing, too, if you want to know what I think.”

  “Thank you, your Honor, then,” Haynes said, not contradicting the military judge but not offering his own opinion, either. He turned to Jonathan Moss and stuck out his hand. “And thank
you
very much. I didn’t think you could bring it off.”

  “You’re not the only Canadian client I’ve had who’s told me the same thing,” Moss answered. “I’ll tell you what I’ve told a lot of them—our courts
will
try you fairly if you give them half a chance.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it,” Haynes said. “I thought they’d lock me up and throw away the key when they brought those treason charges against me.”

  In a low voice, Moss said, “You’d be smart to follow the judge’s advice and not give them any excuse to charge you again. If you come before the court a second time, they’re liable to think that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, even if they did let you off the hook once before.” Listening to himself, he wondered how many clichés he could string together all at once.

  “Wasn’t any excuse to charge me this time,” Paul Haynes grumbled. But then he nodded. “All right, Mr. Moss. I understand what you’re telling me.”

  “Good,” Moss said.

  They left the courtroom together. Spring had been on the calendar for more than a month. Now, as April gave way to May, it was finally visible in Berlin, Ontario, too. The sky was blue, with only a few puffy white clouds drifting across it. The sun was, if not warm, at least tepid. It got up early and went to bed late. Trees were coming into new leaf. A robin chirped in one of them.

  “You’re a good fellow,” Haynes said. He didn’t even add
for a Yank
, as so many Canadians might have done. “I’ll send you the rest of my fee soon as I can scrape the money together. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” Moss said, which was true. His Canadian clients reliably paid what they said they would when they said they’d do it. He wished the Americans he represented up here were as reliable.

  Reporters were seldom allowed in military courts. Censorship still lay heavily on occupied Canada.

  Moss understood that without necessarily approving of it. Here in the street, a couple of newspapermen pounced on Paul Haynes. Moss slipped away before they could start grilling him, too. If they wanted him badly enough, they could run him down at his office. Meanwhile . . .

  Meanwhile, he aimed to celebrate his victory in his own way. He got into his Bucephalus and pressed the starter button. The engine roared to life. A Bucephalus was a big, powerful motorcar. Owning one went a long way toward saying you were a big, powerful man. Owning a new one went a long way toward saying that, anyhow. Moss had owned this one when it was new. Here in the spring of 1928, it was anything but. One reason the engine roared was that it needed work he hadn’t given it. The automobile’s paint job and upholstery had seen better years. He had put new tires on it recently, but only because he’d got sick of patching the old ones when they blew out.

  He put the car in gear and drove west out of Berlin. Roads were better than they had been when he first hung out his shingle in Ontario. The war, by now, had been over for ten and a half years. The roads the grinding conflict had cratered and pocked with shell holes were smooth once more—smoother than ever, in fact. Paving stretched for miles where only dirt had gone before.

  About an hour after leaving Berlin, he drove through the much smaller town of Arthur, thirty miles to the west. Arthur hadn’t bounced back from the war the way Berlin had. It lay off the beaten track.

  Few—hardly any—Americans came here with their money and their energy and their connections with the powers that be in the USA. But for a few more motorcars on the streets than would have been visible in 1914, time might have passed Arthur by.

  A couple of people pointed to the Bucephalus as it rolled through town. Jonathan Moss saw one of them nod. They’d seen the motorcar before, many times. They had to know who he was. If a diehard wanted to take a shot at him . . . He shrugged. It hadn’t happened yet. He wasn’t going to start worrying about it now.

  When he got to Laura Secord’s farm, he found her where he’d expected to: out in the fields, plowing behind a horse about the size of a half-grown elephant. She must have seen his automobile pull in beside the farmhouse, but she didn’t come in right away. The work came first. She’d stubbornly got a crop from the farm every year since the end of the war, and she didn’t look like intending 1928 to be an exception.

  Only after she’d done what she thought needed doing did she unhitch the enormous horse and lead him back toward the house and the barn. Moss got out of the Bucephalus and waved to her. She nodded back, sober as usual, but her gray eyes danced. “You got Paul Haynes off, didn’t you?” she said.

  “Sure did. Not just a reduced sentence, either: full acquittal,” Moss said proudly. “Don’t win one of those every day, not from Major Royce.”

  “That’s . . . swell,” she said. The hesitation probably meant she’d almost said
bully
instead; the old slang died hard, especially in out-of-the-way places like this. She led the immense horse into the barn. When she came out, she asked, “And how do you have in mind celebrating, eh, Yank?”

  “I expect we’ll think of something,” he answered.

  “What I’m thinking of first is a bath,” she said.

  Moss nodded. “Sure, sweetheart. I’ll scrub your back, if you want me to.”

  “I’m sure you will,” she told him. And, as a matter of fact, he did. One thing pleasantly led to another.

  After a while, they lay naked, side by side, on her bed. Lazy and sated, Moss lit a cigarette. He offered her the pack. She shook her head. That made other things jiggle, too. He watched with interested admiration. Though he didn’t care to remember it, he was a little closer to forty than thirty these days; a second round wasn’t so automatic as it had been a few years before. He thought he could rise to the occasion today, though. Laura Secord watched him watching her. “Did you enjoy your celebration?” she asked.

  Had she smiled, that would have been different. As things were, her voice had an edge to it. “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked, and reached out to toy with her left nipple.

  She twisted away. “Why should anything be the matter?” she asked. “You come up here when it suits you, you . . . celebrate, and then you drive back down to Empire.” She stubbornly kept using the name the Canadians had tried to hang on Berlin during the war, before the USA took it.

  Although Jonathan Moss didn’t have experience with a great many women, he knew trouble when he heard it. “Dammit, Laura, you’d better know by now that I don’t come up here just to have a good time,” he said.

  “I know you didn’t used to,” she answered. “But things have been going on for a while now, and I do start to wonder. Can you blame me? Will you still drive up here every couple of weeks in 1935, or will you have found someone younger and prettier and closer to Empire by then?”

  “I’m not looking for anybody else,” Moss said. “I love you, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Do you?” Laura Secord asked.

  “Of course I do!” he said. She looked at him. She didn’t say what she was obviously thinking:
in that
case,
what are you going to do about it?
 The question was, if anything, more effective left hanging in the air. Jonathan Moss took a deep breath. His response looked pretty obvious, too. “Will you marry me?” he asked. “Will you sell this farm and come over to Berlin—you can even call it Empire if you want—and live with me for the rest of our lives?”

  Her nod said that that
was
the right question, sure enough. But it wasn’t a nod of acceptance. She asked a question of her own: “Why didn’t you ask me that a long time ago, Jonathan?”

  “Why? Because I know I’m nothing but a lousy American, and I figured you’d tell me no for sure. I’d sooner have gone on the way things were than have that happen. Hearing no to a question like that hurts worse than anything else I can think of.”

  “What if I said yes?” she asked quietly.

  “I’d throw you into my motorcar, and we’d get back to Berlin in time to find a justice of the peace. If you think I’d let you have the chance to change your mind, you’re nuts.”

  Laura Secord gave him the ghost of a smile. “It couldn’t be quite that fast, I’m afraid. I’d have to make arrangements to sell the livestock or to have it taken care of before I leave the farm.”

  “
Are
you telling me yes?” Moss demanded. She nodded again. This time, she meant it the way he’d hoped she would. He let out a whoop that probably scared some of her feral farm cats out of a year’s growth. Moss didn’t care. And he did rise again, and they found the best way to inaugurate their engagement.

  Afterwards, she said, “I was afraid you didn’t want to buy a cow as long as milk was cheap.”

  “Moo, me?” he answered, and startled her again, this time into laughter. If that wasn’t a good omen, he didn’t know what would be.

 
G
eorge Enos, Jr., set cash on the kitchen table—more of it than Sylvia Enos had expected. “Here you go, Ma,” her son said, his voice breaking with excitement. “We had us a he . . . heck of a run. Cod like you couldn’t believe.” He looked down at his hands, which had acquired the beginnings of the scabs and scars that always marked fishermen’s fingers and palms. “I did more gutting than anybody could think of.

  And with the offal over the side, the birds that came, and the sharks—I never imagined anything like it.”

  “Your father used to talk the same way,” Sylvia answered. She remembered him sitting up over a mug of coffee in the days when they were first married, telling her about what he’d done and what he’d seen and what it had felt like.

  But this wasn’t quite the same, after all. George Enos had done enough fishing by the time he married her that it had become routine, and wearying routine at that. George, Jr., didn’t seem tired at all. Maybe that was because everything still seemed bright and new to him. Or maybe it was just because, at seventeen, he never got tired at all. His father certainly had, though, and he’d been only a few years older.

  “How much is it, Ma?” Mary Jane asked, looking up from the onions she was chopping. She paused to rub her streaming eyes, then let out a yelp—she must have had onion juice on her fingers, and made things worse instead of better.

  “Quite a bit,” answered Sylvia, who’d been trained from childhood not to talk about money in any detail.

  “It will help a lot.”

  “That’s good,” Mary Jane said. “I’m going to look for a shopgirl job again tomorrow. I bet I find something, too. That one I had last summer was swell, but then you went and made me go back to school.” She sent Sylvia as severe a look as a fifteen-year-old girl could give her mother.

  Sylvia had no trouble withstanding it; she’d known far worse. “Summer work is one thing,” she said.

  “School is something else. You need your schooling.”

  George, Jr., glanced at his sister. They both almost—but not quite; no, not quite—invisibly shook their heads. These days, they were old enough to team up on Sylvia, instead of fighting each other as they’d done for so long. Sylvia knew why George, Jr., sneered at school. He was making good money without it.