The Victorious Opposition (55 page)

“A little,” Moss said glumly. A military prosecutor would claim Godfrey had signed the certificate only because of his dispute with the occupying authorities. He would also claim everything Godfrey had done over the past twenty-odd years was illegal because he’d done it without having a certificate on file. A military judge would be inclined to listen to that kind of argument, too, because occupation law presumed the worst about men who’d tried to kill U.S. soldiers.

“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” Godfrey said.

“If you can’t find that certificate, I’m making bricks without straw,” Moss warned. “You’d do better trying to settle—if they will.”

“But I’ve lived a quiet, peaceable life since 1917. No one can say otherwise,” Toby Godfrey protested. “That must count for something!”

“A little,” Moss said again, even more glumly than before.

Godfrey seemed not to hear that glumness—seemed to refuse to hear it, in fact. Clients were often like that: full of their own hopes and fears, they became deaf and blind to anything that ran against whatever they already had in their minds. The Canadian said, “I’m sure you’ll do your very best, Mr. Moss.”

Moss nodded. “I will. But I tell you frankly, I’ve taken a lot of cases where I liked the odds better. If you can arrange a compromise with the occupying authorities . . .”

Godfrey wouldn’t hear of it. He must have thought it was a way of asking for more money, for he set ten crisp, new ten-dollar bills on the desk. “Your very, very best, Mr. Moss.” He didn’t even wait for a reply. He got up and stuck out his hand. Moss took it. His client left the office.

Moss scooped up the money.
I’ll have to mail him a receipt,
he thought, sighing. He would do his best. If you were fighting a foe too much bigger and stronger than you were, sometimes your best wasn’t good enough. The Canadians had found out all about that during the Great War, and Jonathan Moss had been one of the men who taught them the lesson.

He turned the swivel chair back to the typewriter stand and started banging away again. He’d just got up a good head of steam when somebody knocked on the door. “Come in,” he called.
Who the devil?
went though his mind. Clients didn’t usually knock, and he had no one scheduled till the afternoon. The mailman didn’t knock, either. Besides, the mail wouldn’t get here for at least another hour. Just in case, Moss’ hand found the pistol he’d taken to keeping in a desk drawer.

In walked Major Rex Finley. Moss pulled his hand out of the drawer. “Hello, Major,” he said. “This is a surprise. What brings you here?”

“A government-issue Chevy, and I hope it’ll bring me back to London, too,” answered the officer who commanded the airdrome there.

Laughing, Jonathan pointed to the chair across from his desk and said, “Well, sit down and tell me what I can do for you.”

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” Finley said. “I’ve been transferred to Wright Field, outside of Dayton, Ohio. Captain Trotter will be in charge of things here from now on. You’ll be able to keep flying. Don’t worry about that. Before too long, we may want every trained man we can find.” His voice had an edge to it.

“Dayton,” Moss said musingly. “That’s down toward the border, isn’t it?”

Major Finley nodded. “It sure is, and it’ll be even closer if there’s a plebiscite in Kentucky and we lose.” Neither of them said anything after that for a little while. If there was a plebiscite, the USA would lose. Everything Moss knew about Kentucky told him as much. By Finley’s expression, he had the same opinion.

At last, Moss asked, “Do you really think it will come to . . . that?”

“I don’t know,” Finley replied. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Well, well.” Moss whistled tunelessly. “Do you want to go out and get drunk?”

“Too early in the day for me,” Finley said with genuine regret. “And, like I said, I have to be able to drive back to London. But don’t let me stop you.”

“I’ve got work to do myself.” Jonathan looked for a silver lining: “Maybe we’re wrong. Here’s hoping we’re wrong.”

Major Finley nodded. “Yes. Here’s hoping.” But he didn’t sound as if he believed it.

M
ary Pomeroy cut up pieces of fried pork chop and put them on Alec’s plate along with some string beans. Her son ate string beans only under protest. He would eat them, though, and only rarely required threats of imminent bodily harm. Not even threats of imminent bodily harm would make him eat spinach. Bodily harm itself wouldn’t; Mary and Mort had both made the experiment, which had left everyone in the family unhappy.

Mort dug in. “That’s good,” he said.

“Thanks,” Mary answered. “What’s the news at the diner?”

“Not a whole lot,” her husband said. “Two different tables of Yank soldiers talking about whether there’ll be a whatchamacallit down south.”

“A plebiscite?” Mary asked.

Mort nodded. “That’s it. I hear it a dozen times a day, and I never remember it.”

“If there is one, the people down there will vote to leave the United States. They’ll vote to be Confederates again,” Mary said.

“I suppose so.” Mort lit a cigarette. He didn’t care one way or the other.

That he didn’t care disappointed Mary. She did her best not to let it infuriate her. “What do you suppose would happen if we had one of those plebiscites here in Canada?” she asked.

Mort didn’t answer right away. He was blowing smoke rings for Alec. He was good at it; he could send them out one after another. His son watched in goggle-eyed fascination. Only when Mort ran out of smoke did he shrug and say, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think we’d vote to be Canadians again, to be free again?” Mary blazed. “Don’t you think we’d vote to send the Yanks packing?”

“I suppose so.” But Mort still didn’t sound very excited. “But we’re not going to get to vote, you know.”

“Why not?” Mary said. “If the people in those states ever get to, we should, too. I don’t want to be a Yank any more than somebody in Houston does.”

After another virtuoso set of smoke rings, Mort said, “I’ll tell you why not. Because those other places have the Confederate States shouting for ’em all the time. Who’s going to shout for us? We can’t even shout for ourselves.”

Canadians didn’t shout, or not very much. One surefire way to tell Yanks in Canada was by how much noise they made. Mary didn’t just want to shout. She wanted to scream. “We ought to be shouting for ourselves. We’re just as much a country as the United States are.”

“I suppose we could be, if—” Mort began.

Alec interrupted: “More smoke rings, Daddy!”

But Mort stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Next time I light up, sport,” he told the little boy, and turned back to Mary. “I suppose we could be, if they let us,” he said, picking up where he’d left off. “But they aren’t going to let us, and there’s nobody who can make them let us. We’re stuck. We might as well get used to it. If we do, maybe they’ll ease up on us a little more.”

Mary had never imagined hating her husband. She came unpleasantly close to it now. Mort wasn’t a collaborator. Mary never would have had anything to do with him if he were, no matter how he stirred her. But he was—what would you call somebody like him?—an accommodator, that was it. He knew he was a Canadian. He even liked being a Canadian, and was proud of it. He didn’t think staying a Canadian was worth a big fight, though. All he wanted to do was get along from one day to the next.

More and more Canadians seemed to be accommodators these days. That made Mary want to scream, too. Accommodate enough, accommodate long enough, and you weren’t a Canadian any more, were you? Not as far as she could see. Didn’t you turn into a pale imitation of a Yank instead?

“You want to go to the cinema Saturday night?” Mort asked. “The new film about Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment is supposed to be good. And they say Marion Morrison makes a first-rate TR.”

“I don’t think so,” Mary said tightly, fighting hard against despair. Mort already sounded like a pale imitation of a Yank. He would have denied it if she’d called him on it. She didn’t. She didn’t want a fight. Life was too short, wasn’t it?

If you don’t fight, aren’t you giving up, too?
she asked herself. She supposed that was partly true, but only partly. She still cared about the wrongs the Americans had committed in occupying her country. She didn’t, she wouldn’t, forget.

“Oh,” Mort said. “Almost slipped my mind.”

“What?” Mary asked.

“You know Freddy Halliday?” Mort said. That was a silly question; Rosenfeld wasn’t such a big town that everybody didn’t know everybody else. Mary nodded impatiently. Her husband went on, “He says the public library really will open in two weeks. He says, ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ ”

“Do you think it will happen?” Mary asked. Freddy Halliday had been trying to bring a public library to Rosenfeld for years. He hadn’t had much luck till lately. Now he actually had a building a few doors down from the general store. He had it because the pharmacist who was supposed to come up from Minneapolis had got cold feet, but he did have it. Whether he had anything besides the building was a subject of much speculation in town.

“He
says
he has a permit from the occupying authorities in Winnipeg and a budget and books,” Mort answered. “I don’t know if he really does. If he doesn’t, we ought to ride him out of town on a rail, to teach him not to get our hopes up.”

“
My
hopes are up,” Mary said. “You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn’t cost you anything.” She turned to Alec. “I wonder if it’ll have any children’s books for you.”

“Read me a story?” Alec asked, cued by the word
books
.

“After supper,” Mary said. That made Alec shovel food into his mouth like a stoker fueling a fast freight. Mary hoped most stokers had better aim than her little boy did.

It began to look as if Freddy Halliday had all the things he claimed he had. A brass plaque that said
ROSENFELD PUBLIC LIBRARY
went up above the door to the forsaken pharmacy. A formidably stout maiden lady, a Miss Montague, moved into a ground-floor flat in the Pomeroys’ block of flats and began spending all her waking hours in the building. A large truck brought crates of something to the place. If those crates didn’t hold books, what
was
in them?

The promised opening day came . . . and went. Everybody in town joked about it—everybody except Freddy Halliday, who remained resolutely upbeat. A week later, the Rosenfeld Public Library did in fact open its doors.

Mary wasn’t there for the opening. Alec came down with a cold, which meant he had to stay home, which meant she had to stay home, too. She didn’t get to the library for another week. It was a bright spring day, the sky a deep, almost painful, blue overhead. The few white clouds dappling it only made the glorious color deeper. Out on the farms beyond the edge of town, people would be taking advantage of this glorious weather to plant. Mary could just enjoy it. Walking along with Alec’s little hand in hers, she felt guilty about not doing more.

In the library, Miss Montague sat behind a large wooden desk and under an almost equally large
QUIET, PLEASE!
sign. She did smile at Alec, and pointed to, sure enough, the children’s section. She didn’t even breathe fire when Alec whooped with delight at finding books he hadn’t seen before.

Mary arranged to get a library card for herself and one for Mort. She stole brief glimpses of novels and nonfiction books, encyclopedias and magazines and newspapers. “Look at all the telephone books,” she said, trying to keep Alec interested so she could go on looking around. “You can find out the telephone number of anybody in Canada or the United States.” She refused even to name the Republic of Quebec, stolen from her country as Kentucky and Houston had been stolen from the CSA.

“Why?” Alec asked her.

“So you can call them if you want to.”

“But we don’t got a telephone.”

“Don’t
have
a telephone. But if we did, we could.”

“Why?” Alec asked again.

That string of questions could go on all day. Knowing as much, Mary said, “And here’s a book of maps of the whole world.” The big, colorful atlas distracted Alec.

It also distracted Mary, but only for a little while.
If I could call anybody, who would it be? What would I say?
The thought was enough to make her dizzy. She’d used a telephone only a handful of times in her life. The diner had one, but the flat didn’t, and of course there hadn’t been one on the farm. If she had a telephone, and if the farm had one, too, she supposed she would talk to her mother whenever she got the chance. She couldn’t think of anyone else except her sister Julia she wanted to call. The people she knew in Rosenfeld she could visit whenever she pleased, while no telephone would ever let her talk with her brother or her father.

But even if she didn’t have a telephone, lots of people in Canada and even more in the USA did. The telephone book for Toronto, for instance, had to be an inch and a half thick. Mary pulled it off the shelf—she didn’t care even to open a telephone book from the United States. The first name she looked for was McGregor, the one she’d been born with. She found almost a page of McGregors, each name with not only a telephone number but also an address beside it.
That must be handy,
she thought,
especially in a big city where you don’t know where everybody else lives.
After the McGregors, she checked the Pomeroys. There weren’t so many of them—only a little more than a column’s worth. She smiled at the obvious superiority of her own birth name. But then, when she saw the seven pages of Smiths, she decided quantity didn’t make quality.

Alec got impatient watching his mother flip pages back and forth. “Want to go home,” he said.

“Hush,” Mary told him. “Don’t talk loud in the library.”

“Want to go
home
.” Alec didn’t care where he was, and knew where he wanted to be.

“All right,” Mary said. She was ready to go, too. But then, as they were on their way out, she suddenly stopped. Alec tugged at the pleats of her skirt. “Wait a second,” she told him, and went over to the librarian’s desk. “Excuse me, Miss Montague, but could I borrow a pencil and a little piece of paper?”